


I've got you under my skin

by Cuits



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Canon Compliant, F/M, Slow Burn, Soulmate-Identifying Marks
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-01-26
Updated: 2018-03-23
Packaged: 2018-05-16 09:27:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 56,591
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5823304
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cuits/pseuds/Cuits
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In a universe where soulmate identifying marks exist and affect a part of the population, would Mulder and Scully's relationship evolve any different?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. I've got you under my skin

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Dasku](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dasku/gifts), [abrapalabra](https://archiveofourown.org/users/abrapalabra/gifts), [noebing](https://archiveofourown.org/users/noebing/gifts), [Spookygilly](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Spookygilly/gifts).



> If anyone has any interest in following the progress of the fic, I will be twitting my frustration and the fic status with the user @mealteraelego.

_The term ‘soulmate mark’ was first coined by Dr. Bernard Allamand (fr) in 1887 to refer to the impressions on the subject’s skin that allows him/her to recognize the person/people that within the subject's time life is/are the most suitable option as a romantic partner, far above from any other._

\------

Dana Scully is halfway through medical school when the mark appears on her skin.

She discovers it while she showers one morning and she distractedly scrubs the skin of her upper thigh for half a minute before realizing that the foreign pale pink pattern isn’t fading away. She moodily sighs and gets out of the shower to dry herself and keeps on with her daily routine without a hype. She had spent the previous night studying for an important exam and she can’t allow herself the luxury of wasting any of her valuable time to focus on this nonsensical discoloration of her skin. Dana has plans, schemes, a tight schedule to follow and tons of essays to write and hide behind without much of a second though. She has goals and the vision of a certain life for herself that has little room for soulmate identifying marks in it.

A couple of weeks and her final exams go by before she needs to confront the ugly truth of her marked status, the blatant evidence that she doesn't have as much control over her life as she likes to pretend. The hotel room is small and familiar in an impersonal kind of way as she lies half naked on a bed that she knows a little too well. Her skin is a little red and a little bright as Daniel absentmindedly runs his fingers along her body with languid determination.

“What do we have here?” he says stopping the movement of his hand just before reaching her hip and Dana’s breath catches a little at his tone of surprise.

“It’s nothing,” she answers disregarding it with a casual flip of her hand trying to conceal the stressful distress of her voice.

“It’s not nothing.”

She turns around herself in the bed and kisses him hard, with resolution. She is tired and the warmth of his skin on hers feels a little oppressive and uncomfortable in the hot, summer night. She sucks lightly on his lips and shallows whatever he was about to say effectively ending a conversation she most definitely doesn’t want to have, runs her hands over his sweat sprayed chest avoiding the fading mark by which he once recognized his wife.

“Dana,” he murmurs on her lips and she catches his tongue with intent, wary of what he could say. She is a little terrified that he will say he fits in the hidden meaning of the assortment of numbers on her upper thigh. She is also a little terrified that he will say he doesn’t. She runs her fingers through his hair and pretends that she hasn't memorized the eight numbers that can be read with some effort on her skin.

 

\------

_Marks often appear in the early twenties (James, Wong et al., 1908), when main personality traits are defined. Factors that affect age of appearance are multiple and varied, from IQ points to geographic location or socio-economical class (Morgan, J. et al.,1955)_

\------

Fox Mulder is twenty five when his mark first makes its appearance. He just goes to shower one night and there it is: two words clear and inconspicuous, like a tattoo made only with white ink in a handwriting that he doesn’t recognize.

“Great,” he says bitterly to nobody as he scrubs the skin of his left upper leg.

He had been already upset, hungry and sleep-deprived when he had decided to get under the hot water spray, hoping against hope that it would help his muscles relax and clear his mind enough to maybe allow him a few hours of restful sleep. He doesn’t need any kind of distraction, not while there’s a serial rapist in the Baltimore area that they haven’t manage to catch yet, and this particular brand of digression comes as a loaded gun to his brain.

He takes a deep breath, closes his eyes as the hot water falls all over him and tries not to obsess over every piece of data and statistical number he already knows about soulmates identifying marks but the information keeps appearing with insistence in his mind's eye; every case, every profile, every file in which an obsessive personality type perpetrator has lashed out and victimized others using the marks as an excuse.

He can almost taste it, feel it in his own bones, the brutal desperation of the need to connect dripping out of hundreds of guilty confessions of men populating the jails across the country, as if the nightmares weren't enough already, he has now a reminder on his own body of the monstrosity of men.

He gets out of the shower and dressed with clean clothes without bothering to dry his hair off.

As he heads back to Edgar Hoover building he entertains the idea of what kind of tattoo he could choose to cover up his mark.

\------

_Skin impressions often consist of words, dates or numbers with a strong meaning or significance for the subject's intended soulmate. On rare occasions, there have been documented marks consisting of drawings or textured skin arranged in identifiable patterns such as Braille._

\------

She makes it as long as three years and a half before her sister finds out about the mark. She has just joined the FBI and Melissa has insisted on celebrating, which apparently includes the consumption of a vast amount of cheap alcohol.

They enter the apartment giggling and stumbling across the scarce furniture Melissa has arranged around the tiny room she likes to pretend is a dining-room and Dana silently thanks God for not having to go back to her parents’ house in her present state of inebriation.

“How are you able to stand still?” she asks her sister, slurring her words way too much.

“Practice,” Melissa answers in between more giggles.

That’s the last thing she remembers when she wakes up the next morning with the most terrible of headaches in his sister’s bed.

“God,” she groans.

There is an unidentified source of light that her closed eyes don’t seem to be able to block entirely and a second later the mattress sags with the weight of another person making her stomach turn over.

“I brought you a glass of water and a couple of aspirins.” Her sister’s voice is soft and understanding but Dana just can’t grasp the idea of opening her eyes, sitting up and putting anything inside her stomach. It feels like three Herculean works at the moment so she turns on her side groaning some more and tries without success to go back to sleep.

Melissa puts a lock of hair behind her hear caringly and whispers, “I also made you coffee,” and so Dana doesn’t have any other choice that to take up her sister’s offer, open her eyes and try to function like a lesser human being.

She takes the aspirins and drags herself to the kitchen area where the promise of caffeine waits for her.

“So,” Melissa says half an hour later when she more or less starts to feel like a person again.

“So?”

“I had to undress you last night,” she says with a little mischievous smile.

She looks at herself and indeed she is wearing an old cotton t-shirt and colourful sweat shorts that are not her own but she fails to understand the apparent importance of it until she remembers the mark and her body goes stiff as her breath catches momentarily in her throat.

“So, you’ve been soulmarked,” she says and Dana that really, really hates that particular term of slang exhales soundly and rolls her eyes. “When were you going to tell me?”

Never, she wants to say but instead makes a noncommittal gesture with her hand and evades a direct answer. “It’s not that important.”

“It is!” Melissa says excitedly. “You have a soulmate out there! Do you know what that means?”

Dana may not be an expert in all-things-soulmate like her sister but she knows enough; she knows that the pale colour of her mark means that she hasn’t met her intended person yet, she knows that there are more than five billion people alive in the planet and not everybody gets to meet his/her soulmate, she knows that having a soulmate and even finding that person doesn’t guarantee happiness, not by a long shot.

“I know that if Mom, Dad or Bill find out they will insist that I should leave everything behind and concentrate all my efforts in finding him,” she says with a slightly threatening tone.

“I will not tell anybody Dana, but you should be excited about this,” Melissa says taking her hands in hers like she needs her compassion for anything other than her impressive hangover.

“I’ve always done what was expected of me, I’ve followed all the rules, I obeyed all the orders without question but I’m a grown up now, Melissa. It’s my time and I get to make my own choices, not you, not Bill, not Mom and Dad anymore and certainly, not an eight-figure number written on my skin.”

“Oh Dana, don’t you get it?” says Melissa with that sweet, condescending voice she usually uses with Bill. “It’s the choices you’ll make what will lead you to this person, not the other way around.”

Dana sighs and asks for another cup of coffee before admiring out loud the new coloured crystals that decorate the shelves in arranged patterns and if Melissa detects the tactical change of conversation she is enough of a loving sister not to point it out and play along.

\------

_Approximately 60% of the population (UN 1998 estimates) sport soulmate identifying marks at some point in their lives. The marks can change in shape or colour intensity over time._

\------

Mulder lays awake and naked over the sheets. The night is uncommonly hot and the slow circular movement of the fan in the ceiling seems somehow completely futile as the air that moves around the room is also warm and uncomfortable.

“You can’t sleep?” Diana turns herself around to face him, her eyes still closed and her voice full of sleep.

“I never sleep much,” he says.

Diana puts a hand on his chest, slowly caressing his skin before she takes a deep breath and forces her eyes open. She is gorgeously naked beside him but the warmth of her presence feels a little more oppressive than comforting.

“So, _Moby Dick_ , uh?” she says looking at him in the eye while her hands travels lightly to his upper thigh where the words are pale and permanent.

“Are you going to tell me you are a big fan?” he asks incredulously.

“Never read the damn book.”

He snorts and laughs a little, trying for the umpteenth time not to go over and over in his mind about what kind of persona might be obsessed about a fictional white whale.

“What does it feel like?” she asks him seriously. “To have a soulmate?”

He feels anxiety mixed with a great deal of incredulity.

Lost sister, distant mother, unapproachable father. He knows his profile. The idea of having someone out there that upon knowing him would not flee on sight is a little bit too good to be true. Chances are he would probably manage to screw this supposedly fairy tale ending as he has consistently done with every other significant relationship he’s ever had.

Just another person to care for and to end up unavoidably disappointing.

He sighs and grabs Diana’s hand to move it away from his thigh, entangling their fingers together to mask the aggressiveness of the gesture.

“The same as having a Fairy Godmother,” he says deflecting. “If I ever find either of them I’ll tell you if they deliver what it is promised.”

She laughs at the joke but it sounds hollow and forced and Mulder doesn’t know what else to do to keep the awkwardness of the moment away.

“You are supposed to be happy about it.”

Diana’s caresses are suddenly too suffocating for him to bear, as if the soft movement of her fingers over his skin took away the oxygen from him and replaced it with emptiness instead.

“I am supposed to be a lot of things I’m not,” he says sitting up.

She sits up too and tries to catch his arm as he gets on his feet and starts looking for his clothes.

“I didn’t want to bother you.”

“No, no it’s okay,” he lies. “It’s too hot to sleep anyway. I’m gonna go for a run.”

The truth is that he doesn’t want to have that kind of personal conversation. They have managed to open the new department and all those unexplainable cases await them, answers about what happened to his sister were now at an arm’s length and he refuses to spend more of his energy on the ashen words on his skin.

\------

_The disappearance of a mark can either imply that what was displayed is no longer of substantial meaning to the intended soulmate or that the previously intended soulmate is no longer so._

\------

When she gets the notification of reassignment from Quantico to the J. Edgar Hoover as a field agent she is so pleased with herself that not even the fact that nobody has ever heard of her new department can tamper her unadulterated joy down.

“Come on Dana, you can’t really be taking this offer seriously,” Jack says and she tries not to cringe at the obvious mockery in his voice.

She moves around her apartment efficiently, picking up discarded clothes and sorting them before folding them or getting them in the laundry basket while Jack plays with the remote trying to find any sports show.

“I had a meeting with chief Blevins this morning. I can assure you I’m taking it quite seriously, actually.” She keeps her voice intentionally static, as if she was presenting the facts of a case and not getting increasingly pissed off about his unsupportive and lazy attitude.

“Do you know how they call your potential new partner? Spooky,” he says. “ _Spooky Mulder_.” And laughs at what he must think it’s an extraordinary display of superior witticism.

She doesn’t really need a permanent mark on her skin to tell them that Jack Willis is not the one for her (if such a thing even exists) but for some reason, at the time it had made sense. She lets the laundry basket down and crosses her arms over her chest looking at him intently, trying to figure out what part of him made her think that he deserved her consideration, trying to discern what it is that he finds so funny about this situation.

"It's a joke, Dana," he says in such a condescending way that she is tempted to just grab her keys and go. "The whole offer is a joke."

She has plans, goals, expectations to reach and this offer not only puts them in motion but also makes her a field agent before her very reasonable schedule.

"I am going to take the job, Jack, it is a good opportunity for me regardless of Fox Mulder's nickname," she says it with her best professor's voice, calm and understanding but firm and steady, which only seems to aggravate Jack all the more. He throws away the remote over the cushions of the sofa and gets up with an aggressively offended attitude.

“Are you going nuts?!” His hands are on his hips and the crease on his forehead reminds her of the one the bull in cartoons gets before charging against its target. “This is definitely not how you want to make a reputation of yourself. Within or without the Bureau.”

She was raised by the Navy. Her father, her brother, her teachers, her neighbours were men of the sea, tough and unbendable. This is not the first time in her life that a man has stood tall in front of her with his chin defiantly high, trying to tell her what she can or can’t do but Jack’s attempt strikes her as kind of pathetic. There is a needy insecurity in his eyes and an ugly sort of envy in his demeanour that spurs her pity instead of her rage.

“I don’t think you have any say in the matter,” she says calmly.

Jack’s breathing quickens and his face gets all red with unrepressed anger. “Oh yeah? That’s what you think? Well maybe I think you don’t have a place in my apartment then.”

It’s petty and mean but all that Dana is able to feel when confronted by the evident end of their relationship is a quiet sadness and a sense of lost time.

“Okay,” she accepts and turns to take her coat, her wallet and the keys of her car. It’s just when she is at the door, opening it to cross it for the last time that she allows herself a small amount of cathartic unkindness. “I’ll guess we won’t see each other around since you are staying at Quantico. Goodbye Jack.”

\------

_Identifying marks are usually located on similar parts of the body in all members of the intended relationship._

\------

Mulder is absolutely exultant.

They come back from Bellefleur empty-handed, exhausted and with their clothes smelling like humidity and smoke and yet Mulder feels the bursting sensation of anticipation blooming inside his chest. Time loss, abductions, an alien autopsy and metallic implants: it has been just about everything he has been hoping to stumble on one day. So maybe he has no proof of any of it yet, but it only means that he will have to be more thorough, more careful, more sibylline next time.

He is so excited that when he showers to scrub the grime of the travel off his skin he doesn’t notice that the colour of his mark is darker now, the colour of his new partner’s freckles instead of its usual flesh-pink.

There is so much going on in his mind, filled with the many new possibilities within his reach now that he has some means at his disposal that he feels high for a week. He has a partner, the first since Diana left, and a modest budget. Everyday of that week he enters his basement office, where so many cases wait for him to unravel them, and feels that little flame of shy happiness within himself. Oh, and Scully is there too. Every day of that week when he pushes open that door she is already there, working through the paperwork, trying to change the view of modern physics laws or whatever it is that she did, and soon enough, before he has time to realize what is happening and stop it, the very sight of her makes him a little more relaxed, a little more lighter.

 _Pavlovian response_ , his mind has come to associate her with the gratification that he finds in his work, nothing else, he thinks as he scratches his thigh absentmindedly. His mark has been itchy as hell for the last couple of days, as if trying to get his attention and making it harder for him to ignore it as he usually does.

“So, how is it going with that new spy-partner of yours?” asks Frohike when he stops by the Gunmen’s place to check some new info on recent sightings on the West Coast.

“She is okay,” he says with some disregard.

“Have you managed to figure out her hidden agenda yet?”

Mulder tries not to grimace at the harsh tone of the other man, after all, Scully has been working her fingers to the bone trying to justify the expenses of two cases that turned out to be nothing more than redneck’s scams for tourists, not to mention that last week she almost got her liver removed in quite an unsophisticated way in the line of duty.

“I’m not so sure about the hidden agenda thing anymore.”

His mark itches again and Mulder forcefully rubs his hand over his trousers with more than a hint of frustration.

“Are you okay there?” Frohike asks him more out of curiosity than concern. “Maybe you should ask your new BFF agent doctor Scully to check it out for you.”

He rolls his eyes annoyed and tries very, very hard not to scratch his upper thigh again. The last thing he needs is for any of the Conspiracies Everywhere Trio to find out about his mark.

He will absolutely never hear the end of it.

\------

_Although marks are always a mean of identification it does not imply reciprocation; in fact several studies (Morgan, J. 1955, Johnson, W., Lin, B.T. et al. 1986) have revealed that up to 65% of the participants sported unreciprocated marks. The largest chain of unreciprocated marks (where subject A’s mark identifies subject B, whose mark identifies subject C, and so on) ever registered was up to thirteen degrees and located in a small settlement in East Africa since then popularly known as “Heartbroken Town”._

\------

It is out of a rather misplaced sense of curiosity that she goes in search of Samantha Mulder’s file.

The traffic has been out of the ordinary light that morning and even after a strategic stop to buy coffee and a cream cheese bagel she still finds she is quite early when she finally opens the basement office door.

There is neither pending paperwork nor any ongoing case that require her attention and Dana Scully has always been particularly bad at sitting idle with nothing else to do. She takes a brief walk around the office until her eyes stop on the cabinet and before she consciously thinks about what she is doing she reaches among the weird order of the folders until she finds what she hasn’t realized she was looking for.

She opens it and looks at the picture of the young girl for a minute or so before starting to read the casefile report. She doesn’t expect to find anything relevant that Mulder hasn’t already told her, just details, just something to fill in the blanks and occupy some of her spare time. Instead what she finds stops her breathing, accelerates her heart rate and makes her vision blur.

27-11-1973.

The date of Samantha Mulder’s abduction.

_27111973_

The same path of arranged numbers scribbled on her upper thigh: her soulmate identifying mark.

She carefully closes the file, puts it back in its place as if nothing ever happened and looks at the clock calculating the time she has before Mulders arrives.

This — this can’t be real. She takes a deep breath and tries to lower her exceedingly fast heartbeat. _It means nothing, it changes nothing_ , she tells herself and by the time her partner arrives to the office she has almost convinced herself of it.

“Skinner says we have to go to court today,” says Scully before he has a chance to even greet her. “No excuses.”

Mulder makes a face. “But my dog ate all my documents liable to be presented before the judge.”

She laughs a little by pure reflex and stops herself from contemplating if maybe there is something particularly telling about the way she responds to him.

Mulder has a charming, boyish demeanour that goes with his cheeky good looks but she looks at him from across the room and doesn’t recognize a life partner in him, doesn’t see the mystic complement to her own existence that the mark on her upper thigh supposedly implies.

Later after they come out of court and find a cassette recording on the dashboard of the car, she watches a british detective kiss Mulder a few steps away from her and if she feels a sudden pang of uneasiness in her stomach she convinces herself it is just a matter of decorum.

\------

_The first official soulmate related register is dated back to 1912 in China. It was one of the first measures of the new republic and provided its growing population with the family name and general specifications of the marks of those that had been soulmarked._

\------

He has never been much of a sleeper but these days Mulder is lucky if he gets to close his eyes for more than a couple of hours at a time. His eyes are a constant reminder of the situation, reddish and desolated, desperate for the sight of her, for any clue, functioning only by sheer force of will.

Every morning he waits awake for the alarm clock to go off, he gets up from the couch and takes a couple of seconds to look at his reflection on the mirror; dark circles under his eyes and the shine of a cross that it’s not his dangling from his neck. He takes a deep breath and undresses himself before entering the shower. It’s not until the hot spray of water hits his skin that he takes the courage to look at his mark.

Every morning. Day after day.

He looks at the mark and exhales a relieved puff of air because the two words are still there, its colour intensity a little faded but definitely there. Later on the day Margaret Scully will call him and he will tell her again that he doesn’t have any good news to give her but he will say that he believes her daughter is still alive while clutching the flesh of his thigh.

Mulder believes that Dana Scully is still alive in the same way he believes that she is his soulmate, with a proofless, blind faith strong enough to push him to keep going against all odds.

She never said anything that could lead him to think that _Moby Dick_ has any special meaning to her aside from her father being a sailor but he has this recurring dream that is maybe more telling than the mark on his thigh will ever be, a dream he’s been having for quite some months now.

In this dream he is alone in a desert, screaming and shouting so loud that his own hears ring and his throat feels raw and sore. People start to appear from nowhere, walking around but going nowhere and he keeps on yelling at them but nobody seems to take notice of him. Soon enough there are so many people around him that he can’t find any space for his voice, he can’t scream and he can’t breath and when he feels like he is going to pass out from lack of air someone catches his hand. He turns around and it’s her, with her clear eyes, and her bright hair. With her unmistakable little smile.

“I listen,” she says.

Her voice is clear and strong and it gives him air to breath as the people around them disappear.

He feels so happy in that moment, so stupidly, unmeasurable happy as only you can be when you are dreaming of things that can’t be, but as soon as he tries to get near her, to hold her, she starts to get farther away from him, until her hand is gone from his and she is nowhere to be seen. He is alone again as he starts to fall into a bottomless pit that makes him wake up with a start.

It’s not a subtle dream, he doesn’t need to be the psychologist he is to interpret it.

Scully is been gone for two months when Frohike appears in his apartment with a couple of bottles of liquor and the single purpose of getting miserably wasted together.

“She is alive,” his slurred words sound convincing enough coming from someone with half a bottle of vodka in his hand.

Frohike sighs and drinks and sighs some more. They are both sitting on the floor with their backs against opposite walls of the room, their legs splayed in an undignified manner as they drink.

“The mark is still there,” he murmurs but in the complete silence of his apartment the words seem amplified.

The other man makes a face that sends Mulder into a humorless giggle state. “You have a mark? You never mentioned it.”

It is maybe the first time he has voluntarily spoken out loud about his mark but the drunken haze of his mind prevents him from marking such an occasion.

“No. I never mention it,” he says and Frohike nods with apparent disinterest. Mulder takes another sip from his bottle.

“Is the mark about Scully, then?”

Mulder shrugs. That is, after all, the key question he can’t really answer.

“It is still there.”

It’s not really an answer but Frohike seems to take it nevertheless, making him feel a little less lonely in his convictions. He touches the golden cross he carries around his neck: convictions.

He would compromise to believe, in God, in karma, in anything, if he could just find her and bring her back.

He relaxes his grip on the bottle and leaves it on the door by his side.

He needs to bring her back.

\------

_Although early studies confirmed that hurting one’s soulmate provoked a reflex pain coming through the perpetrator’s mark (James, P., Wong, L. et al., 1908), later, more thorough studies detailed that for a reflex pain to appear the wound inflicted upon the soulmate must be physical and not psychological or emotional and the victim has to perceive it as an intent to harm (Martin, J., 1955)._

\------

She shoots him in the shoulder and the burning pain in her thigh comes as a surprise. She doesn’t really have time to contemplate it anyway; Krycek runs away and she has a bleeding, unconscious partner to take care of.

She doesn’t have any focus to spare.

She has to tend the wound and take him out of town. She has to make arrangements to get proof before it all disappears into thin air, before the men in the unmarked van in front of Mulder’s apartment take care of everything.

She takes a deep breath and goes to get her medical kit. Every time she makes the suture needle pass through his flesh there is a mirrored sting in her thigh. She takes a deep breath every time and keeps going, surpassing the irrational fear that she might be doing something to her mark: erasing it, changing it into a grotesque reflection of the terrible fact of using violence against one’s soulmate.

“It’s going to be alright. Everything is going to be all right,” she says for her own benefit, but she caresses Mulder’s soft hair to reassure them both.

She has to clean everything and change clothes and maybe she’s a little afraid before she looks at her thigh and sees that her skin is unaffected, that her mark is still there if maybe a little less intense in colour than usual.

She breathes her relief and goes to find some adequate clothes for Mulder. She has to change him out of his current attire, wet with sweat and blood and if she has the passing temptation to check on his leg she disregards it easily enough.

She has a lot of things to do in a discreet manner and little time to do them; facing the emotional repercussion of Mulder’s mark or lack of it, is a luxury she can’t afford to take right now; not to mention the lack of decorum and professionalism it would entail.

She moves around efficiently and wonders if she could pinpoint the exact moment in which her mark stopped bothering her and became some sort of reassurement.

\------

_Marks have been a recurring point of focus in social and religious ceremonies for centuries in almost all cultures. The first theological and scientific book published exclusively dedicated to the topic was “The Godblessed”, written in 1898 by George Salinger and translated to more than 50 different languages since then._

\------

The night is cold and dark, and maybe he lost his surviving instinct a long time ago but he doesn’t feel like being anywhere else in the world. The humidity has started to curl Scully’s delicate hair and he has the constant impulse to smooth it out.

And maybe they are about to be eaten by the prehistoric creature that took Scully’s dog as a snack, but her warmth is a constant reminder of her presence by his side and really, they have been stuck in far less agreeable places than a rock in a lake.

“Why did you name your dog Queequeg?” he asks to keep the conversation going. The name sounds familiar but the rippling waters around them keep him distracted enough not to really care.

“It was the name of the harpoonist in Moby Dick,” she says and Mulder feels his heart skip a beat. “My father used to read to me from Moby Dick when I was a little girl, I called him Ahab and he called me Starbuck. So I named my dog Queequeg.” He smiles or maybe nods as he listens a little mesmerized. “It's funny, I just realized something.”

He works to keep his breathing normal, unassuming, tries to hide in the darkness of the night and deflect and not to act as a person that just had accidental confirmation of the identity of his soulmate.

“It's a bizarre name for a dog, huh?”

“No, how much you're like Ahab. You're so consumed by your personal vengeance against life, whether it be its inherent cruelties or mysteries, everything takes on a warped significance to fit your megalomaniacal cosmology.”

He snorts lightly, he thinks that the significance of this particular moment fits his megalomaniacal cosmology just fine.

“Scully, are you coming onto me?”

They are on a rock in a lake in a forest. Maybe civilization ended since the beginning of their conversation- Maybe they would be alone and forever tied. Maybe Scully would perceive the transcendent meaning of the conversation and answer yes.

“It's the truth or a white whale. What difference does it make? I mean, both obsessions are impossible to capture, and trying to do so will only leave you dead along with everyone else you bring with you. You know Mulder, you are Ahab.”

Maybe he is, after all, he has Moby Dick written on his thigh and Starbucks by her side. He has the truth and a large mass of water around them. Ahab was driven, Ahab was never alone, Ahab helds a unquestionable significance to Scully and he can definitely live with all that.

“You know, it’s interesting you should say that, because I've always wanted a peg leg,” he says.

She smiles and there is nowhere in the world he’d rather be, mythical monster in the lake or not.

\------

_There hasn’t been any registered cases in which identical twins sported identical marks leading scientist to believe there is no direct correlation between genes and identifying marks._

\------

Philadelphia turns out to be nothing less than a complete disaster. Scully sees the elusive looks that follow her around, hears the accusations in hushed voices as she walks the hallways of the Edgar Hoover building and holds her head high showing a proud demeanor that she doesn’t really feel but that keeps her going.

At least she has the small comfort of having given her colleagues something other than her _suspicious_ loyalty to her partner to talk about behind her back.

She gets into the elevator alone and as the doors close she breathes deeply and leans back against the wall. The dull pain at the small of her back is a reminder of the mess she managed to get herself into but it is also a reminder that she still have choices left, regardless.

She arrives to the basement door and opens it with little ceremony, almost with a yank. There is contained anger in every little thing she does but she doesn’t try to rationalize it away, instead Scully welcomes it, thrives with it; this unjustified anger and her wrong choices give her life, a sense of purpose, a petty way to claim a stake.

Behind the only desk in the office, Mulder sits with his arms almost spread over the wooden surface of the table as if also pettily claiming his own stake. There is an open folder he was pretending to read and Scully doesn’t need to get any closer to know that is the Ed Jerse case.

She doesn’t let go of the doorknob, the threat of just turning around and leaving without a word for explanation dangling in the air as Mulder holds her gaze in a very passive-aggressive way.

“So, how are you today, agent Scully?”

Maybe is the use of her work title or the condescending tone but she is more than ready to answer him with an impolite “fuck you” and just be done with it, but instead she smiles a fake saccharine smile.

“I’m fine, thank you, agent Mulder. How very rare and nice of you to ask.”

They stare at one another for a couple of seconds more before Mulder reaches out and closes the open folder set on the desk and she finally closes the door behind her.

It’s a rainy day and every light in the office is on to compensate for the lack of sunlight and the artificial atmosphere gives the place a sense of unreality. She soundlessly sighs and crosses the room to the stack of paperwork patiently waiting for her to proofread and sign.

Scully works silently and concentrates hard on the words in front of her eyes to help block out the annoying little noises constantly revealing Mulder presence, until the phone rings an hour before lunch-time.

“Skinner wants to see us both in his office. Immediately,” he says with a flat tone.

She gets out of the office and into the hallway without hesitation and does not look back to see if her partner is following; she waits for him to catch up with her as the elevator doors open to finally speak to him again.

“Do you have any idea what does Skinner want?”

They both get into the elevator facing the hallway and the doors close again Scully can see on the shiny surface the humorless smirk on Mulder’s face.

“Gee, I don’t know, Scully. Not everything is about me.”

She wants to hit him. To hurt him. She wants to punch him in the face and leave him with a blue eye but she bites the inside of her cheeks and crosses her arms over her chest instead.

“Not everything, but regarding this particular floor there are more than one or two things that are definitely all about you.”

The elevator’s doors ding open again and as she starts to walk out, Mulder hand falls into its familiar place at the small of her back and exactly over her fresh new tattoo.

Scully involuntary flinches and they both freeze in place for a moment.

“Well, that is something that it’s most definitely not about me,” he whispers and walks away in the general direction of Skinner’s office.

Her marks itch with a mix of irony and fury and for the first time in years she wishes there wasn’t so much of him on her skin.

\------

_Soulmate identifying marks were one of the main arguments in legalizing interracial marriages in the United States. More recently, with a similar statutory process homosexual marriages were legalized in The Netherlands, Belgium and Spain_

\------

  
Mulder decides to go for the lab results himself on a whim.

He doesn't hold such an special bond with the lab agents as her partners does and it is much her undisputed territory in the same way that contacting with The Lone Gunmen is his own, but he ran out out of sharpened pencils to throw at the ceiling twenty minutes ago and Scully is scheduled to impart a class at Quantico until the afternoon.

He doesn’t think about it until he sets foot in the lab but it is absolutely possible that for the last four years he has never been there without Scully by his side. It is more than absolutely possible, it’s a certainty because he would have remembered feeling this out of place.

He comes into the lab and he can see the falling faces of every agent he greets as soon as they realize he is there without the gracious presence of his red-headed partner. He can’t really blame them, more so when he suffers quite a similar condition, but he can’t help the pang of upsetting territoriality that comes with the recognition that Scully has many more admirers than he has realized.

“Good day agent Mulder, to what do we owe the pleasure?” Agent Pendrell welcomes him with with a smile that is a little too tense to be completely sincere.

“I just found myself with some free time on my hands so I’ve decided to check on the results for the Blebbing case.”

He makes a noncommittal gesture with his hands and refrains himself from elaborating on a complex excuse for daring to come to the place without Scully granting him access.

“Oh, the Blebbing case. Sure. I’ll be right back,” he says disappearing behind the tallest wall of cabinets Mulder has ever seen.

Mulder drums his fingers on the spotless counter to his right and tries unsuccessfully to ignore the looks and stares of a large percentage of the technicians that inhabit the lab, he can feel them staring daggers at the back of his neck and the obviously unwelcoming atmosphere is suddenly so oppressive that he has to reach for the knot of his tie and loosen it a little bit.

He is not new to the feeling of being unwanted by his colleagues but he often forgets the buffer effect of his partner, the way she usually shields him. These people were nice to him merely a week ago and the contrast makes him unbelievably uncomfortable.

“Agent Mulder, here are the results you were asking for.”

Pendrel appears out of nowhere with a manila folder in his hand and Mulder will blame it on the heat, not having proper breakfast and an inadequate conjunction of the stars when he blurts, “Scully is on Quantico duty,” as if he has been caught with his hand in the cookie jar and her name was the get out of jail free card.

“Yes, I know,” Pendrell answers without skipping a beat and it is under the heavy silence afterwards that they both realize that the vast divulgation of feelings hidden in behind such a short exchange of words.

Mulder reaches for the file wordlessly, navigating the awkward situation as best as he can but the Gods are never in his favor and the file slips from his hand before he can grab it properly, papers hitting the ground and flying in every direction.

“Let me help you with that.”

They both kneel down to retrieve them when Pendrell pushes his sleeves up in an unconscious gesture that leaves both his forearms naked in plain sight.

Mulder’s fingers stop frozen as the mark on the inside of Pendrell’s right arm jumps at him: it is a word, solid black and written in what’s undeniably Scully’s handwriting. He feels suckerpunched as he recognizes the childhood nickname that his partner has casually mentioned once or twice before.

_Scout_

When he lifts up his gaze, the other agent looks pale and sweaty, the look of someone who’s very probably about to throw up.

Mulder can certainly sympathize with the feeling.

“It is a nice tattoo,” says Mulder finally, offering them both the easiest way out. “Well defined lines, the work of a true artist.”

“Yeah.”

He picks up the remains of the file from the floor and heads out of the lab sparing them both from having to exchange niceties any further.

His fast heartbeat thumps and echoes in his ears as he navigates the building by habit and muscular memory alone as his mind crazily searches for recent images of Scully’s forearms.

_What if... what if…_

It resonates in his head at the frantic rhythm of his pulse, but he can’t find within himself the strength to finish the thought.

\------ 

   
_It is estimated that only roughly 20% of the population presents more than one mark that refer to the same person, while 34,5% sport simultaneous marks identifying different unrelated individuals._

\------

It has taken her some time to find a doctor she trusts and feels comfortable with after the whole Dr. Scanlon’s farce. She had reluctantly agreed to be hospitalized again for a few days, to starts again chemotherapy to treat the tumor growing inside her and monitoring the unlikely progress of the drugs.

That’s when her second mark appears. If she wasn’t so exhausted and nauseated maybe she could find the strength to appreciate the irony of it, of the ways her body keeps finding to sabotage her.

It isn’t ambiguous or subtle. It isn’t discoloured and blurred waiting for her to get used to it before gaining on definition. No, this mark is angry black against her pale, thin skin and learning its meaning doesn’t require a convoluted guessing game. Six letters scattered vertically on the left side of her ribs arranged in the only way they would spell her surname, its handwriting as familiar to her now as the word itself.

She looks at her reflection in the mirror and sighs. The air feels heavy and complex in her lungs and she has to close her eyes for a moment to suppress a wave of nausea. The mark is not visible when she puts her arm down and she wonders with morbid curiosity if it will fade as quickly as it appeared when she stops breathing or if it will be still readable when they prepare her body for the funeral to come. She wonders if they will tell her family. She wonders if they will understand.

Scully dresses herself slowly, with the constant, torpid movements that is as much as her body can manage right now. She goes to bed and looks at the book that stands unopened on the bedside table and that she brought with herself in an optimistic second thought.

Her whole body aches with every little movement but she makes the effort to stay awake nevertheless. Her stomach contracts as her marks itch in synchrony when she thinks about Mulder and the most probable outcome for her. She will die, in some months or a couple of years, and he will watch her get consumed, reduced to a shadow of herself. She wishes she could spare him the pain of letting her go. She hopes Mulder will never find out he is her soulmate; knowing him it will only fuel his guilt.

She is so tired that keeping her eyes open requires almost too much energy and the next thing she knows is that the room is dark and unlit and that someone is holding her right hand.

“I didn’t want to disturb you.”

“No, no, it’s alright. What time is it?”

She tries to sit up straight without slipping her hand out of Mulder’s warm one and looks around the room carefully to steady her battered sense of balance.

The curtains let enough street light go through the window that she can make out Mulder’s features and the silhouette of her diary carefully resting on the nightstand, still she turns on the bed lamp.

“It’s around half past ten. You should rest.”

He caresses the back of her hand with his thumb with slow insistence and Scully doesn’t need to see the troubled look in his eyes that his smile doesn’t manage to hide to know that something is wrong. “I’ve been resting. What’s going on, Mulder?”

“We’ll talk about this tomorrow.”

“No, I want to know about your day at work. Now,” she insists. Mulder has been in a frenzy since Penny’s death, going away and trying to cover his tracks badly every time she needs to be hospitalized, if even for a day. “Didn’t you going to search that facility in Falmouth? What have you found?”

Mulder's smile falters and he tries to cover it with a self demeaning snort. “You’ll think I’m crazy.”

“That has never stopped you before.”

“Clones," he says with a gravitas that she can't quite understand. “Hybrid clones.”

She thinks about asking what kind of hybrids, what kind of clones but Mulder seems to be in an uncharacteristic quiet mood and she chooses her words wisely. “Did you get any proof?”

”Where would be the fun in that?”

He smiles and she smiles tightening the hold of their hands.

"I will know more tomorrow," he says after a beat.

"What happens tomorrow?" her voice sounds firm but calm although she feels even more worried than usual now that she will not be able to be by his side.

"Skinner is going to set a meeting for me."

"A meeting? With whom? About what?"

His smiles broadens and pats affectionately her hand. "We will talk tomorrow."

Scully sighs resigned, distracted by the feeling of his warm skin on hers. Her quick heartbeat echoes in her ears as he looks at her in the eyes and she knows that he is not telling her the whole truth, but she can only hope that this time he won't end up in who knows which godforsaken country.

"So how was your day? Is it the food any good around here?"

"Better than at that place near your apartment."

"Ugg, Scully, don't even mention that disgusting place, remember that time —"

He stops mid-sentence at the same time that his thumb stops caressing the back of her hand and when she follows his gaze his stare is fixed in her right side, where she is mindlessly scratching the itchiness of her new mark with her free hand.

Her hand freezes and she feels suddenly out of breath. There is no way for him to know... unless...

His gaze drifts to the inside of her elbow where a nasty bruise from tests previous to the chemotherapy is starting to show. Scully relaxes and smiles softly, trying to convince him wordlessly that she is mostly doing okay.

“I should let you rest.”

“No!” she says surprising even herself as she catches his arm in a kind of desperate way. She feels the limits of her humanity tonight, she feels the fragile line that distances her from ceasing to exist and Scully feels slightly terrified to feel forsaken and alone. “No, Mulder, I’m fine. You don’t need to go.”

She can’t help falling asleep a little while later, with Mulder’s fingers caressing lovingly the skin at the inside of her wrist.

“I’m gonna fix this, whatever that it is they did to you I’m gonna fix it,” she thinks she hears him saying but she is too exhausted to open her eyes. She feels his long fingers to move a lock of her hair away from her face and dreams he kisses her on the forehead, and if her marks warms up and tingles too, Scully chooses to believe she dreams that too.

\------ 

_Unmatching soulmate identifying marks were the first cause of marriage annulment during the victorian period. Although fully legal and recognized by the religious authorities of the time, any topic related to soulmate marks was considered highly scandalous._

\------

He looks at the reflection on his own naked body in the mirror. The bathroom light is warm and yellow-ish, not like that unkind, bright fluorescence that seems to inhabit every conceivable corner of federal buildings.

He looks at his body in the secure privacy on his apartment and prays everyday that he progressive loss of definition of his soulmark is but a product of his worried mind and nothing else. He looks at himself and remembers those months so long ago when he frantically checked his mark twice everyday in search for a clue about Scully’s whereabouts.

Mulder wonders how many more days of panicking in front of a mirror he has before it will become futile. He would count his blessings if he could panic in front a mirror for the rest of his life.

He gazes at the reflection of his upper thigh, challenging it, intimidating it into not fading away and when his head starts to hurt in concentration and the distant sound of an alarm going off echoes on the walls of the apartment, he takes a deep breath and stops staring.

He is going to be late for work if he doesn’t start moving and he can’t be late for work. Not today. Scully starts the new treatment today and he needs to be on his very best behaviour if he wants to have any chance of getting away with the transgressions he will surely need to commit.

He turns as he raises his left arm to comb his hair with his fingers and he thinks he sees something on the mirror out of the corner of his eye; something black and permanent.

Something that stops his breathing.

He turns around again and very slowly raises his arm again. There is an black mark there, across his ribs and along his side. A new mark, bold and unapologetic. A little itchy.  
_11-16-1994_

Long, elegant numbers that don’t hide any secret meaning to him; that’s the date Scully came back to work after her abduction. He might have not it printed on his skin before but it was certainly printed on his brain.

The alarm goes off again and this time he gets in motion without a second thought.

A new mark is good. A new mark is almost the promise of a longer future. It buys him time, or so he thinks and nobody will make him change his mind (not that anybody is going to try). Mulder will take the mark and claim it, and stand by it against all odds if necessary; he never needed that much to believe in the extreme possibilities to begin with.

He dresses himself and checks briefly that the numbers don’t insinuate themselves through his white dress shirt before heading out with new air in his lungs.

The day ahead seems to be full of new possibilities now.

\------

_Up to 1995, 23% of blood crimes in the United States of America were related in someway to soulmate identifying marks._

\-----

It’s been the wrong kind of a long week.

She takes the gym bag that sits idle in the trunk of her car and carries it with her to the women's locker room of the FBI training facilities. Three girls died because of a mad man’s obsession with an identifying mark and Scully hits the treadmill trying to erase from her mind the image of the desolated parents upon recognizing the mutilated bodies.

She mustn’t exhaust herself. Her oncologist would have a lot to say about that, but the blood pumping through her veins and the beat of her heart resonating in her ears as she pushes herself to run faster helps quiet the imaginary cries she hears inside her head.

That kind of criminals shouldn’t be able to have soulmates. No woman should suffer the curse of falling in love with a monster.

Her skin is reddened and heated from the exercise when she finally steps down from the treadmill feeling like she can face the world again. The hair at her nape is damp with sweat and so is the back of her grey cotton t-shirt and she breathes hard while her heartbeat progressively steadies itself.

When she picks up the phone she has a missed call from Mulder and for the first time since her marks appeared she feels really blessed.

\------

_The number of registered studies focused on the effect the death of a marked person has on her/his intended soulmate identifying mark/s are well into the hundred of thousands and although an official posture hasn’t been adopted, it’s of common agreement that marks identifying a dead person usually disappear in the twenty four hours following said death._

\------

The funeral for Agent Pendrell is scheduled for a Wednesday evening in a modest church just outside DC. The building quickly fills with family and friends and the many colleagues that arrive promptly for the ceremony have to fight their way to get past the outside door.

There are a lot of bussiness suits among other dark clothes but in the first row Mulder can distinguish a couple of red-haired women and a strawberry blonde man that can only be Pendrell’s family. Mulder sighs and steals a quick glance at Scully.

They are packed inside the church and the voice of the priest comes too distorted by the echo of the walls to understand a single word he says, and yet Scully seems to be perfectly able to discern when to sit and when to stand up, when to silently pray and when to say “amen”.

Mulder feels just a little too out of place. Like every single one of the present living souls could tell his lies, could feel the joy behind his sadness; he would trade any man’s live for Scully’s any day. He would have traded his own life, just as much as Pendrell if it has been his choice.

When the ceremony ends Scully insists on presenting her respects to the dead agent’s family so he nods and makes a quick gesture to indicate that he will be waiting for her outside as she and Skinner get in line to say some appropriate combination of words that would express a respectful shared sadness.

Mulder feels like he was never taught that language.

It is warm for early March but the pavement and the grass are wet, signs of the rain fallen while they attended the service and Mulder focuses on measuring the depth of puddles with the point of his shoe until most of the attendants have left and there are no more familiar federal faces loitering around, then he finds a dry spot on a bench at the side of the church and waits for Scully there.

He wonders briefly how many of their co-workers would make the effort of going to his funeral but he can only see Scully there. Maybe Skinner, depending on how much of a pain in the ass he had been lately.

He wonders if given the likely event of his dead, anyone would put two and two together and tell her about his marks.

There are soft steps and a sigh and when he looks over his shoulder she is suddenly there. Behind her Skinner gives him a solemn nod before heading back in the general direction of the parking lot as Scully takes another couple of steps and sits heavily at his side, their arms and legs slightly touching.

She closes her eyes and lets the sun warm her face for a few minutes before taking a deep breath and looking back at him.

“He had an elder sister and a younger brother,” she says, her eyes and nose are red and her voice subtly falters.

Mulder nods and bends over to pick up a pebble off the grass. He measures it tentatively with his fingers before throwing it out to the horizont. The gesture seems hollow and banal but he bends down again nevertheless, grabbing a couple of pebbles this time.

He doesn’t know how he could begin to console her but he tries anyway, puts the smooth stones on the palm of his open hand in a silent offer. She picks one with her soft fingers barely touching his.

“He had a mark,” he says surprising them both, and the he dares to take her hand and put his index finger at the inside of her wrist. “Right here.”

There is no matching mark on the skin under his finger the feel of it runs an electric wave along his spine and he takes his hand back as she looks at him with uncertain eyes.

“ _Scout_ ,” he says. “That was his mark.” And throws a second pebble out with no real aim.

Scully inhales soundly as she recognizes her childhood apelative and lets her pebble fall to the floor with a soundless tud and for a couple of seconds she doesn’t move, like she has suddenly realized the real impact of Pendrell’s loss.

She puts her hands over her face as the tears start to slowly fall from her eyes and in her grief she turns and leans a little on his shoulder.

“I am sorry, Mulder,”her voice little broken at the end.

He doesn’t know what she is sorry about exactly but he takes her in his arms and kisses the top of her head pretending not to notice the weight she has lost recently. He embraces her with all that he’s got and prays to a God that is not his that he never has a chance to check how many of their colleagues will go to his partner’s funeral.

\------

_Before the establishment of dna test as forensic evidence, false soulmate identifying marks were frequently used in scams involving paternity claims or identity thefts ._

\------

 

Attending Eddie Van Blundht’s request of an interview with Mulder has been a very bad idea. The case had been the proverbial shape-shifting elephant in the room for over a month now and so the trip back from Cumberland Reformatory is as tense as can be expected. Scully drives, her knuckles white from grabbing the steering wheel with determination as she tries to concentrate on the road ahead and not so much on the king of passive aggressiveness currently sitting on the passenger seat.

Clearly the whole affair has been more than a little uncomfortable on both their accounts and though both of them have walked on eggshells and have obviated the topic as much as possible in order to forget and leave it all behind them, the Eddie Van Blundht Incident was starting to become something alike an infected splinter in a finger: not a real risk but a constantly annoying, very dislikeable situation.

“The director of the reformatory said that he has been asked permission from the scientific community to initiate several different studies on Van Blundht’s condition,” her voice irrumps as she tries to distract herself from the icy silence inside the car, and maybe be forever done with the resilient awkwardness surrounding this stupid case. “Apparently there is quite an interest in figuring out the extensive of the voluntary movement of his particular musculature as the precision of his… shifting was quite remarkable.” but Mulder barely acknowledges her with a restless shift on his seat and keeps staring out of his window.

Scully grabs the steering wheel with a little more force. Her whole face still flushes anytime a flash of memory drifts into her mind; a random image of Mulder’s face close to hers, of him leaning in on her sofa, the eager look on his face as he looked at her drinking wine.

She should had known better.

She should have known better and her partner seems to be making sure she receives the appropriate punishment for this terrible crime. There has been a constant nervous anger always surrounding Mulder since he found her and Eddie in a kind of compromising position, his displeasure that the romantic tendencies of the impostor didn't tip her off had made him unsubtly moody.

“There has even been talk of trying to genetically map the _Van Blundht Syndrome_.”

“I don’t care.” Scully knows him well enough to recognize the calmed violence in his words and she sighs. She would probably be mad at him for this juvenile behaviour if it wasn’t because her embarrassment and even humiliation for the whole fake-date fiasco take too much of her remaining strength.

She sighs tiredly.

“Mulder, the case has been closed for a month, let’s just forget about it.”

“Sure.” Yet the word sounds more like a reproach than an agreement.

Scully lets it go nevertheless and chooses to keep concentrating on anything but the charged atmosphere inside the car. .

“I’m marked,” he says suddenly out of the blue, still sounding pissed off at her for some intangible reason.

She lets the steering wheel slide a little across the palm of her hands out of surprise but he notices the sudden change of direction he doesn’t say anything.

“What?”

“In the event of another doppelgänger that is a way of distinguish me from not-me. I’m marked.”

She feels a sudden lump in her throat, her skin itching with fierce indignation where she knows her own marks display.

“Okay,” she says the word quietly, trying to figure out what to do with that information, shapeshifters aside.

She looks at him from the corner of her eye but he doesn’t look any different than a minute before; not tell-tales, no cryptic words on his visible skin and a rush of different questions form in her mind. She wonders if he was marked before she met him or if it is a more recent development. She wonders if she should disclose that she is marked too. She wonders what other secrets he has been keeping from her.

“Frohike knows,” he says interrupting her imaginary interrogation. “In case you ever need to—”

“Okay.”

She doesn’t need further clarification about in which cases she would need to know more about his soulmate, she is not sure she wants further clarification. Her heart beats hard as her pulse resonates in her ears and all she wants to do is cry or scream or eat a pint of ice-cream as she process and rationalizes, the way she does with the things that have the potential to hurt her the most. But they still have at least half an hour before they reach the Edgar Hoover, and so Scully takes a deep breath and keeps on driving as if the world didn’t just turned a little upside down.

_Fucking Eddie Van Blundht._

\------

_The Luanda Syndrome (Luanda, W., 1962) describes a psychological reaction in which a person somatizes a soulmate mark triggered by a deep obsession with another person. These marks never acquire texture or full color and they never remain on the skin for more than a few months._

\------

He sees her through the window of her hospital room and stops for a second before entering. She is so pale that her skin gives the impression to be translucent under the unforgiving artificial light.

He smiles for her and closes the door as he enters the room implicitly making light of the situation.

“Mulder, what are you doing here?”

“I heard you were being moved out of ICU and you were feeling better.”

She doesn’t look like she is feeling better but he keeps a cautious smile on his face.

“Mulder, someone is gonna see you.”

“It’s okay, I’m officially among the undead.”

He kisses her cheek and takes her hand while they talk. Her clear eyes are full of worry for him and every and each cell from his body hurts with the knowledge that they did this to her.

They did this to her because of him.

He hair looks incredibly colourful against the white, aseptic sheets and he wonders how something so bright could be dying. How is it possible that the whole world isn’t turning itself off along with her.

“Hey Scully, how about those Yankees?” he asks in a poor attempt to distract them both.

He can’t stop touching her. Her hair, her hand, her arm, her cheek. He can’t stop reassuring himself of her presence. There is a dull pain at the bottom of his lungs that is connected with the thought of her death and his marks protest angrily at the reality of being losing her with every passing breath.

They fucking did this to her because of him and he will do absolutely anything to revert it; he will destroy worlds and take down empires, consequences be damned, and he knows this with a ferocious certainty that should scare him.

“Mulder, you have to lay it on me. You have to tell them I killed that man,” she says and he feels like burning the world to ashes.

Scully is offering him her integrity, something that she holds holy above anything else and he recognizes the resignation behind her words.

“I can’t do that.”

He can’t take what she is offering anymore that he can stop breathing.

He steps out of the room and into the hallways of the hospital to find the devil waiting for him. He smells of cigarette smoke from afar, a sideway smile on his face and Mulder knows what is to come; the Cigarette Smoking Man has come to collect his soul in exchange for Scully’s health; he would see that the world end if that were the price for Scully to be well again.

His soul seems expendable enough where Scully herself is not.

 

\------

_War and Natural disaster crisis are usually responsible for the loss of the soulmate identifying marks of up to a 35% of marked people involved in the events._

\------

Miraculous recovery from incurable cancer doesn’t mean instant recovery as Scully comes to find out.

Her body fights to get back to normal as it tries to process the remains of chemotherapy and experimental drugs and she feel immensely tired as a result. She lets herself fall asleep every time her lids become heavy, not afraid anymore that she will never open them again, that she will be wasting away what little remaining time she might have left.

She fights her way out of the hospital after the third round of tests confirming the remission of her cancer to complete her healing process at home, at her bed and among her things which not so long ago seemed like she would never get to enjoy again.

Bill helps her carrying her things back from the hospital, hugs her with a promise that they will see each other soon, at Christmas and leaves for the airport and back to his life. Her mother stocks her refrigerator full and warns her that she will be calling her tomorrow.

It gives her comfort, this resemblance of normality.

Mulder arrives at 8pm, announcing his presence with a telling knock on the door. He carries a ton of dvd’s and an apologetic smile and Scully lets him in with unsurprised indulgency.

“I thought you might be already bored of reality TV.”

“I’ve seen so many programs of houses being repaired and redecorated that I think I could work as interior decorator now.”

He snorts and follows her to the couch. He is dressing casual, a black t-shirt and jeans that don’t stand out that much next to her blue silk pajamas as they both sit, almost snuggled against each other, and she puts her feet up on the empty seats of the sofa.

They don’t talk about this new… _thing_ , where he comes to her house, or touches her hair or grabs her hand and draws little circles with his thumb on her skin. They don’t talk about how Mulder came to visit her every night at the hospital and she pretended to be asleep.

She doesn’t even want to really contemplate it and merely disregards it as cancer side effects, like her new, thinner hair. All will come back to normal, she is sure, as soon as she goes back to work and her normal life but for the time being she leans on him and lets Mulder embrace her with the arm that is not holding the remote.

“Do you like Chevy Chase, Scully?”

“It doesn’t matter. We both know I will be asleep in twenty minutes.”

“Is that a polite way to say I that bore you more than Extreme Makeover: Home Edition?” The vibration of his chest as he speaks resonates in her with familiarity.

“I don’t think anyone can ever accuse you of being boring, Mulder.”

His hand caresses her upper arm over the silk of her pajamas absentmindedly.

“You tell me the nicest things, Scully.”

“Shut up, Mulder, I’m watching Chevy Chase.”

She smiles against his t-shirt and closes her eyes for a moment. From time to time she indulges herself into this kind of vulnerability, the kind where she is peacefully unguarded for a brief time or when she allows herself to wonder about her marks.

It’s like taking a bubble bath or opening a fine bottle of wine just for oneself.

She no longer doubts whom the soulmate marks identify but if maybe they could be reciprocated. The question usually answers itself in the form of another phone call informing her that her partner has ditched her again to fight a loser’s fight.

She is starting to fall asleep, her breathing even and deep and her conscious mind drifting away. “Mulder,” she murmurs, she wants to ask what has happened, why the mark in her thigh started shifting the night he got the chip, over the fading date of his sister’s disappearance the word “truth” was more defined with every passing day. She doesn’t ask him though. “I’m falling asleep on you.”

Mulder chuckles and the soft touch of his finger along her jaw makes her take a deep breath.

“I’ll survive,” he says with a voice so low that is barely audible over the tv. “We both will.”

\------

_Only a 4% of known elected leaders around the world up to 1997 sported visible identifying marks._

\------

He buys white flowers for Emily’s funeral and a bottle of vodka for the aftermath. He leaves Scully to mourn her loss with her family and comes back to a hotel room that smells like stale air and dusty carpets.

He strips down to his boxers and looks at himself in the mirror as so many times before but this time, the mark on his leg has faded, its contours diffused as another word appears gaining colour and definition.

“Emily”, it says.

Mulder breaks the seal of the bottle and drinks the liquor straight out of it until he can no longer feel the hollow pain inside his chest.

\------

_An amendment to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights entitles all individuals the right to not be subjected to discriminatory laws involving soulmate identifying marks._

\------

There is a non-written rule in the Edgar Hoover that any agent not currently working an active case is always on duty for other departments that might need back up. The thing with working in the X-files and that non-written rule is that she ends stuck at Quantico and doing autopsies almost as often as Mulder ends up helping profile minor pervs for local PDs

It is not as bad as it could be; it beats working for financial crimes, generates far less paperwork than your average case and puts a good word for them with the people that care about departmental budgets and closed cases rates.

A tic for tac sort of thing.

That’s how she ends up calling at the Lone Gunmen’s inconspicuous door on a Tuesday afternoon.

“Agent Scully, to what do I owe the pleasure of your ever charming presence?” Frohike greets her at the ever dark entrance.

She forces a glossy magazine clipping to his hands and sighs audibly. “Mulder needs a favor.”

Like the magic words of Alibaba’s tale, Frohike steps aside and lets her in the proverbial thief’s cave.

“Is he working on an X-file?”

“I think he is trying very hard to find one. Or at least anything with a resemblance enough to get him out of Gainesville police station.” And almost to herself she adds, “and out of his misery.”

Frohike takes a look at the clipping, something about ritualistic animal sacrifices that Scully didn’t really wanted to investigate much about. Byers and Langly are nowhere to be seen and he starts to type in search for whatever that it is he is searching for. Scully takes a look around imagining the wonders that a little decoration and a good distribution could do for the place.

Apparently, she is irremediable hooked up on house remodeling shows now.

“I think Mulder might be out of luck this time,” Frohike says into the empty space, his fingers still flying over the keyboard and his eyes glued to the screen.

“Bound to happen someday.”

“The death of these pets doesn’t seem to follow any kind of pattern.”

She is walking along the wall with her arms crossed over her chest when one of the newspaper pieces pinned to the ever full board catches her eye. It’s partially hidden by more recent pictures and clippings but the words _soulmate mark_ are perfectly visible.

She carefully moves the material around so the piece of paper can be totally readable in the dim light that anything conspiracy-related seems to require. The article talks about a love triangle within the FBI that almost ends in tragedy; the story seems shady to say the least but the initials F.W.M. are quite telling.

“What is this?” she asks turning in time to see Frohike lift his eyes from the screen and become suddenly paler as he recognizes what she is alluding to.

“Oh. That. It’s nothing. Just — nothing.”

“And you have had this _nothing_ pinned to the wall since 1991?”

“We are terrible at housekeeping.”

She lets the silence make a point for her and starts to walk in Frohike’s direction with obvious determination. “You know I have a gun, right?”

“All right,” he says, his hands up in the air in surrender, “but don’t tell Mulder I told you.”

She puts her hands over her hips and lifts an eyebrow. “Told me what.”

Frohike sighs and seems to slump in his chair with the intangible weight of whatever that it is that he is holding back. “It was back when Mulder first came across with the X files. He had a girlfriend back then, also an agent in the Bureau, and then there was this other agent in the Bureau — a soulmarked in the face agent.”

“Ouch,” Scully sympathizes. She can’t bear to imagine what kind of burden that must be, your privacy exposed in your face for everyone to see.

“Yes, well, as it turned out this particular soulmark was all about Mulder’s girlfriend and things got messy and ugly.”

“How messy and ugly?”

“Crossed-attempted-murder-accusations-messed and forced-reassignments ugly.”

“Okay.”

“Mulder was pretty devastated by the whole affair and we suspected some form of foul play but in the end he didn’t want us to look any further into it.”

“Oh. Did he say why?” she presses shamefully. She shouldn’t, this is none of her business, this is not work related but her marks itch with the anticipation of knowing more.

“No.”

Frohike looks at her like he has said too much but would like to say more and Scully feels like she is forcing her hand into this conversation. She nods and starts to cross the room, headed out. There is an uncomfortable feeling at the bottom of her stomach and too many conflicted thoughts that she would like to mull over alone.

“Scully. For such a consistent believer in extreme possibilities Mulder was pretty cynical about soulmate identification marks. He doesn’t like to talk about it much.”

“Yeah, I’ve noticed.”

Frohike looks at her with a sympathetic sad look. This must be it. She knows that Frohike knows about Mulder’s mark and this story and that look tells her it is not about her.

There is a lump in her throat when she speaks. “I’ll tell Mulder there was no luck with the rituals.”

She makes it all the way home before she lets herself cry.

\------

_Divorce rate among compatible soulmate marked marriages is of 0.1% on average. It is estimated that it decreases to 0.01% once isolated socio-economical and political-religious factors._

\------

Mulder walks down the street looking for the silver grey sedan that has to be parked around somewhere. The night is warm and dry which is more than he can say for most of the stakeouts he gets to do.

He hears a car door open on the other side of the street and sees agent Stalinsky get out of the vehicle and walk away down the street. Next shift is ready, it seems.

Mulder approaches the car and gets inside the passenger seat as he unzips his jacket. Behind the steering wheel Scully looks as tired and bored as a living, breathing person is allowed to be.

“Did you miss me?” he asks. He has brought a paper bag with him and puts it temporarily at his feets while he takes off his leather jacket.

“Immensely.”

Scully keeps looking out of her door’s window and at the unchanged façade of the suspect’s house as he throws the jacket to the back seats.

“I am choosing to ignore the sarcastic tone of voice.”

“Don’t you ever?”

“Come on, Scully, I brought you frozen yogurt from that place you like. Be nice to me,” he says adjusting the seat from his previous occupant.

Scully finally, finally, turns her head to look at him and he takes the paper bag at his feet to offer it to her with a smile.

“With cranberries?”

“And blueberry syrup.”

Scully smiles, the unguarded kind of smile she rarely shows at work, and goes for the bag with a kind of avid enthusiasm.

She takes the tub and a plastic spoon out of the bag and closes her eyes savouring the first spoonful of the desert as soon as it touches her lips.

“And I’m always nice,” she says with the spoon still in her mouth.

Mulder reclines his head on the headrest and looks at her while she enjoys the frozen yogurt; the way her shoulders relax and how the crease between her eyes deepens in concentration as she takes the right amount of yogurt with the right amount of syrup in every spoonful. Her lips are red from the cold instead of lipstick and the content gesture on her features makes her look many years younger.

His marks tickle like a warm caress made with the tip of soft fingers, and he wonders how was he not immediately this in love with her the first time he met her.

“So how was stakeout with agent Stalinsky?”

Scully rolls her eyes in an exaggerated way and groans loudly. Apparently this new trend of alternating eight hours shifts relieving a member of the stakeout team every four hours was as much to Scully’s liking as to his.

“He insisted on telling me all about this suspicious rash to see if I could offer him a medical opinion.”

“Urg,” Mulder offered with sympathy.

“And then he proceeded to talk for two hours nonstop about his many athletic feats when he was in high school.”

“Ouch.”

She takes another spoonful painfully slowly into her mouth and Mulder feels vertigo just contemplating the fact that he could be happy if he could have Scully in his car just talking to him and eating frozen yogurt for the rest of his miserable life.

“Admit it, Scully, you like me better than Stalinsky.”

She chuckles like the premise is so preposterous that it is humorous in itself.

“You brought me frozen yogurt with cranberries and blueberry syrup, Mulder. Right now, I like you better than most.”

Her tone is as flat and clean as she would use to speak of anything unimportant but his heart still skips a beat. He was never good at deception, never good at hiding truths and of lately it seems to him that the fact that she is his soulmate emanates from every pore of his skin, hangs in the meaning of every word he says.

If only he wouldn’t risk losing her.

“I think this whole alternating partnerships for half the stakeout shift is all a part of a convoluted plan within the FBI designed for you to realize what a catch of a partner you have,” he says, deadpan.

“Or the simplest explanation being that Skinner is still pissed off at me for backing you up in the Oak Brook incident,” she says looking at him in the eye like this was a private joke they share.

The Oak Brook incident. Folie a Deux said her report but he asked her to believe and she had, and “you are my one in five billions” had tellingly fallen off his lips without much of a second thought.

“Ah. Occam’s Principle of Limited Imagination strikes again.”

She laughs softly and the sound fills the air like magic, making him grin without having much of a say. Scully looks at him and he looks at her and the car feels like dissolving and disappearing around them as the silences stretches and becomes solid and heavy with significance.

He wants to believe. Gods, he wants so hard to believe.

“So, Mulder”, she breaks the silence with a mischievous bright in her blue eyes, “any suspicious rashes you want to ask me about?”

 

\------

_Home tests to discern soulmate identifying marks from tattoos were created in the last decade of s. XIX scams involving faking marks started to proliferate among the higher socio-economical class._

\------

Scully remembers, vaguely because she has put quite an effort in forgetting it, that one time she got irrationally jealous about Mulder. There was an interstellar conjunction of some sort and a tall, blonde detective in Mulder’s bed. She was petty and he was a jerk; the jealousy was another side effect of the collective hysteria.

This is completely different. She is not feeling irrationally jealous and although he is acting like a jerk, there’s not a blonde detective. Instead there is a brunette ex-girlfriend that — Scully prays to God — she hopes she doesn’t have the misfortune to find in anybody’s bed.

She leaves Gibson’s room and goes straight home. She opens a bottle of good wine and runs herself a bubble bath but when she disrobes and the image in the mirror forces her to accept the uneasiness of reality.

The mark on her upper thigh is impeccably defined and angry black, almost throbbing. Truth, it says. Powerful. Demanding.

She turns slightly and lifts her left arm to see the one scripted across the ribs. It looks smaller than usual even when its size hasn’t changed. It looks like it wants to run and disappear. Scully, it says, and she feels the same way.

She knows how to add two plus two and knew that Mulder’s soulmate coming back and making an appearance was a possibility that has finally materialized in the form of one very special Agent Fowley. What Scully never imagined was becoming so easily discarded, like everybody knew she was a temporary solution and nobody bothered to tell her.

She gets into the bath and lets the heated water swallow her whole to control the impulse of calling him and demanding an explanation.

_I have my name on my skin. Listen to me. I used to be important to you, I have the proof. Listen to me._

She scrubs the dirt of the day off her skin leaving red marks where she has insisted the most; marks of her own design.

She refuses the small comfort of crying because she is Captain Scully’s daughter after all and there is a very special child in need of her help. If Mulder now suddenly finds that her opinion is nothing more than a nuisance, that he can trample on the base of their partnership and disregard her voice he never knew her at all.

Even if her heart hurts she will do what she has to do.

\------

_Up to 52% to marked population sustain long term, satisfactory, romantic relationship with unmarked partners. Only in a 67% of those cases, the unmarked partner was the intended soulmate of the marked one._

\------

It’s half past seven when he arrives to Scully’s door. Not too late, not too early, with a selection of cult movies under the arm and a bag full of Chinese take out. Antarctica has left both of them exhausted, and once again on medical leave.

When Scully opens the door, she avoids his eyes but smiles a little as she lets him in so he takes a step and kisses her cheek carefully avoiding the frostbite that has claimed the skin on her cheek and lets his good humour show in a big grin.

He managed to save his partner and get into a real, functional spaceship: let the celebration begin.

“I brought something to eat,” he says lifting the bag to eye level.

Scully looks at it and then looks at him for a brief moment before taking the bag and heading to the kitchen. “If you value your life I hope there is no frozen food or ice-cream in here.”

He chuckles. “Your lack of faith in me is heartbreaking,” he says walking toward the couch and leaving the DVD’s he has brought on the coffee table. “Although I did bring Fargo in case you missed the snow.”

She puts the food in actual plates and brings them to the coffee table so they can both eat while sitting on the couch. He knows she doesn’t usually eat on the couch, she has a table in the kitchen area and another dining table and Scully is nothing if predictable in her own routines.

He knows her routines, he knows she likes to lit aromatic candles when she is particularly stressed or that she meticulously cleans her gun on sunday evenings before going to sleep. He knows the exact arrangement of her furniture and her decoration and the clean, simple smell of her house that is even more comforting to him than his own house.

He knows she concedes this use of the sofa for him and it makes him swell with a pathetic sense of vindicated male territoriality.

He puts the DVD on — Twelve Angry Men — and she takes her plate and sits on the couch with her legs crossed indian style at least three feet away from him.

“Is everything okay?” he asks trying to make eye contact with her but she merely nods and starts to eat without giving him any other consideration.

He wouldn’t need to be a professional profiler to see that she is suddenly uncomfortable with the intimacy of their recovery time routine, uncomfortable with his presence near him and his muscles clench fearing her rejection.

The hallway. His almost explicit declaration and her lips so close to his that that he could taste the sweetness of her breath. So close that it hurts to even remember it.

“I’ve read your preliminary report,” she says out of the blue, her voice is cool and collected and he tries to catch up and shift back to a more professional demeanor.

He takes his plate and sticks his chopsticks in it.“ And what do you think?”

She shrugs. “There is not much I can say about it. I was unconscious pretty much the whole time.” And then, almost to herself she murmurs, “And naked apparently.”

Scully’s dress code is always impeccable but she has never given any indication of being particularly prudish and given the circumstances of her almost certain death Mulder would have thought that she wouldn’t have minded to sacrifice her modesty.

Apparently he was wrong.

“Scully, is there something bothering you?”

She takes a decisive deep breath and leaves her food on the table, turns, and finally, finally, for the first time since he arrived, she looks at him in the eye without subterfuges.

“Did you —” she starts and thinks better of it. “When I was naked. What did you see?”

He saw the interior of a spaceship, humans collected as harvest with alien lives growing within them and her pale, pale lips as he took out the tube of her mouth.

“I’m not entirely sure what you’re asking about.”

She doesn’t skip a beat when she says, “I’m marked.” All business, as if his world hadn't just turned upside down. “And I wanted to know if you saw.”

His heart is beating too fast to make sense of anything. He wants to interrogate her with the hundred of questions that pile in his mind like flammable goods waiting for a match. Has she identified her intended? Where is it? What does it say? Is it him? God, let it be him. No, no, it can’t be him. Is he going to leave him for another person? Is she ever going to leave him?

“It was dark,” he says at last, “and there was too much going on and little time for us to get out of there alive. I didn’t look.”

It’s the truth. _God_ is the truth but he looks in the archived images of his photographic memory for something, anything, that he could have recognized as a mark under the dirt and the organic goo.

“Okay,” she says. She believes him, the surprise must be written in his face, and then she takes another deep breath and he can see her physically relax, taking her food plate again and rearranging her position on the couch significantly nearer to him.

“Is it Frohike, thought?” he asks. Deflection has always worked well for him, so why change now. “I will not judge. Well maybe I will judge, but just a little.”

She hits him playfully on the shoulder and he mocks a real injury. On the screen Henry Fonda is about to give the plot a spin.

He has to think. Quickly. Think, think, think, think. He looks at her through the corner of his eye, clean, rested and moderately happy and his stomach makes a weird somersault with the realization that there are far worse things than Scully leaving him to be happy with the love of her life.

“Hey, Scully,” he calls for her attention, his voice almost not faltering at all. “Do you know the story of Fishhooks McCarthy?”

She looks at him with a wondering look but recites nevertheless, “ _Oh Lord, give me health and strength. We’ll steal the rest?_.”

He nods.

“We have relative health and strength. We’ll dig out of the ice the rest.”

\------

_Matching soulmate identifying marks and a statutory declaration of common law union have similar consideration as spouses according to legal jurisprudence in both the United States and the United Kingdom.In other countries’ ‘Carta Magna’, matching soulmate identifying marks have different types of legal benefits._

\------

Their new work placement has its perks if someone were eager to see them. It is nearer to the parking entrance, there is a coffee machine and a couple of vending machines that sell her favourite soda on the same floor, and having colleagues working around them could be extremely convenient in days in which not killing her partner was an act of faith imposed by God Almighty himself.

That and toilet paper.

A bathroom permanently well stocked with soap and toilet paper is definitely one of the benefits of working on a floor with a secretarial pool and a couple of fellow female agents.

_Parking, coffee, soda, witnesses, toilet paper._

That’s what Scully repeats to herself as a mantra when she opens the door to the bathroom and finds it _almost_ empty.

_Parking, coffee, soda, witnesses, toilet paper. Parking, coffee, soda, witnesses, toilet paper._

In the middle of the room, imperviously washing her hands like the world started and ended with the impeccable dark shine of her hair, special agent Diana Fowley looks impassively at her and smiles minimally. If it weren’t because Scully absolutely refuses to concede her an iota more of her territory than what she has already been forced to give her, she would have turned around and gone away without giving Fowley the pleasure of uttering a single word to her.

“Good morning, agent Scully,” she has the nerve to say.

Scully lets the door close behind her and advances a couple of steps in her direction. She doesn’t smile, doesn’t uncross her arms when she speaks. “There is a bathroom in the basement, in case you didn’t know.”

“Oh, yes, I know. But it doesn’t always have toilet paper.”

Scully would have laughed at the irony but the sarcasm of the situation is a little too painful.

“Well, you can’t have everything, can you, Agent Fowley?” her voice is cold like sharpened glass aimed to cut. “Unless you sell your soul to the devil,” she adds muttering.

Diana turns around to look at her face to face instead of across the reflection of the mirror and takes a step forward with a bothered smile on her face and a hand perched on her hips.

“Agent Scully, we don’t have to be friends, but we don’t have to be enemies either,” she says, not for the first time. “Fox trusts me.”

Scully’s blood just boils with the implications. She is tall, slender, with long legs and dark, long hair and she wouldn’t need to know that there is a mark somewhere on Mulder’s body that claims Diana’s name to recognize that she is exactly his type; Scully has seen those tapes that aren’t his one time too many not to know that.

“I am not like Mulder.”

No. She is definitely not like Mulder; she isn’t blinded, neither by faith nor by attraction. Even much less by love.

“Isn’t _that_ precisely the issue, Agent Scully?” she uses her title as an insult. “You never wanted the x files, you’ve spent years trying to debunk Fox’s work, to slow him down, to prove him wrong, to what end? To save your precious respectability?” She takes another step and she is so close now that scully has to look up to keep the defiant eye contact. “Now is your chance, Agent Scully. Take it. Make a career within the good, old parameters of the FBI and don’t look back.”

She would like to plant her heels on the floor and make them grow roots if only not to not give in any space, not even an inch of tiled bathroom floor.

“Don’t presume to know my agenda, Agent Fowley. God knows I don’t presume to know yours.”

The taller woman chuckles and laughs humorlessly for a second before heading out but Scully is too angry to count it as a victory in her favour.

_Parking, coffee, soda, witnesses._

She can definitely scratch bathroom facilities from the short list of perks of her new workplace allocation.

\------

_While DNA tests are not acceptable in a court of law when the accused has an identical twin, fingerprints or soulmate identifying marks are._

\------

_The cold metallic touch of Morris Fletcher’s wedding ring in his hand is new and uncomfortable, a constant reminder of the person he isn’t, more so than mirror and reflections. He thought he would have gladly paid the price of a hellish suburban life in exchange for all the secrets of Area 51 but as it usually turns out, reality is far more complicated than pressing or not pressing a red button._

_“Scully, it’s me, Mulder,” he says closing the door behind himself._

_She found him. She found him! He is almost ecstatic because he can’t imagine any reality bizarre enough in which Scully wouldn’t make anything better and save the day. And, okay, maybe he didn’t really expected her to believe him just like that from minute one but he is somehow completely unprepared for the the way she tries to break physical contact when he ushers her across the front yard._

_“I'm Mulder. I'm really Mulder. I switched bodies, places, identities with this man Morris Fletcher, the man that you think is Mulder, but he's not,” he explains, waiting for the realization in her eyes. When he doesn’t find it, he looks nervously around and sees his new body reflected in the car window. “Of course you don't believe me. Why was I expecting anything different?” He tries to think of information that will convince her that he knows her. “Your full name is Dana Katherine Scully. Your badge number is... Hell! I don't know your badge number. Your mother's name is Margaret. Your brother's name is Bill Jr. He's in the Navy and he hates me.”_

_It’s her eyes what surprises him the most, her blue, clear eyes look at him with a distant coldness that he doesn’t recognize. It makes him fear that something similar has happened to her too, that maybe this is not really Scully he is talking to._

_“Lately, for lunch, you've been having this six-ounce cup of yogurt, plain yogurt, into which you stir bee pollen because you're on a bee pollen kick even though I tell you you're a scientist and you should know better,” he tries._

_Scully doesn’t look baffled but as incredulous as he remembers her to be, and the sum of her little gestures are so familiar to him that she can’t be anyone other than who she is._

_“Look — Any of that information could have been gathered by anyone.”_

_“Even that yogurt thing? That is so you. That is so Scully. Well, it's good to know you haven't changed. That's somewhat comforting.”_

_Scully keeps looking at him with a minimum amount of disdain that makes him want to crawl to his knees and ask for impossible things. This is not the way you look at me, he wants to shout, because maybe he wasn’t fully conscious before but he remembers with the unnerving detail provided by an eidetic memory the kind, warmth of her eyes when she looked at his imposter at the beginning of this mess._

_“I don't know what the point of all of this is,” she says._

_‘We are soulmates’, he wants to say, ‘I’ve realized the way you look at me and I believe we are soulmates’, but that would only close her off even more._

_“I'll prove it to you,” he says instead, and prays to a God he doesn’t believe in that he is right about everything and after all._

\------

_Several studies on the matter point to higher levels of understanding in non-verbal communication between subjects with reciprocated marks although (Morgan, J. 1955, Johnson, W., Lin, B.T. et al. 1986) factors like previously established relationships, of any nature, couldn’t be isolated._

\------

She arrives to her desk to find a couple of unusual things: an official looking paper addressed to her from Kersh’s office and a small, red box filled with half a dozen of her favourite chocolates on top of it.

She sits on her chair and looks around covertly trying to discern if she is being the object of a joke but nobody seems to be paying attention to her, and Mulder, as far as she can see, is nowhere to be found.

She moves away the box and leaves it aside to read what happens to be a note formally informing her that her attendance to this year’s team seminar will not be required, quite a feat taking on account that after five years missing the event, this time would have made her presence mandatory according to Bureau regulations.

“Mulder,” she calls him as soon as he sits at his desk. “Do you know anything about this?”

“What’s that?”

“Kersh ordering us not to go to a team seminar this year.”

He smiles, exuberantly, and reclines throwing a rubber ball to the air and catching it with his right hand. At that moment he looks untroubled and incredibly young.

“How did you manage it?”

He rests his arms on the desk that comes between them and leans towards her confidentially, shamelessly invading her personal space.

“I applied to it. Reverse psychology, Scully.”

She smiles and holds his gaze. “And the chocolates?” she asks because there is no other person in the building that would know that they are her favourites.

“To compensate you,” he says, still looking at her far too close. “In case you wanted to go.”

Unseen, under the table she clutches her hand to her tight, where the first mark appeared and hopes she looks far more unaffected than she feels.

\------

_Excluding external factors and circumstances, marks tend to be more sensible to the intended’s touch than the surrounding skin._

\------

Scully takes her shoes off and sits on her side of bed, although technically, both are her sides since it is her bed and her bedroom.

“So, assuming you are right,” she says letting the sentence hang as she takes her jacket off, and that is quite an assumption, “how do you propose that we should proceed?”

He turns himself on the bed, laying on his side propping his elbow for support, the newspaper forgotten between them as she lies down facing up.

“Isn’t it obvious, Scully? We should make Holman talk to Sheila about his feelings,”

She has her hands crossed over her stomach and smiles with her usual exceptisim. “And you think that’s an easy task. Really?”

Either she took her socks off before or she didn’t wear any because her feet are bare on the duvet cover and he feels the stupid impulse to touch them with his own bare feet, to interlace their legs and keep going on with this conversation in hushed voices.

He looks at her profile with thoroughness, at the curve of her smile when she talks, at the freckles across her cheek under the remains of her day makeup and the slow up and down of her chest with each breath. He feels so close to her in that moment that he wonders where she is the rest of the time.

“Well, believe it or not I have this paper with the seal of Oxford University that says that I’m actually qualified to help people that have problems expressing his feelings in an adequate way.”

“What can I say, Mulder, I’ve seen you point your gun at so many people in a rampage that you could have me fooled.”

“But that is my specialty, Scully.”

She turns towards him and they are face to face now, between them an ocean of fifteen inches keeping them apart.

“Explain this to me then, Mr Professional Psychologist, if Holman repressed feeling are causing this crazy weather, what does that say about that poor cow flying into your room?”

He is a little lost in the playful brightness in her eyes. “What?”

“According to your theory, either Holman has repressed feelings towards you or Sheila has unrepressed feelings towards you and Holman knows about it.”

He stretches his arm and lets his head rest on the pillow to be at eye level with her. He will move to forsaken Kronen and its crazy microclimate if he could just live in this moment in which Scully seems happy and he feels happy, with no crossfire, gubernamental conspiracies or messed up misunderstandings. Nothing but fifteen inches of bed between them.

“We’ve been here for two days, nobody is having repressed or unrepressed feelings towards me,” he murmurs, cautious not to scare them both with the volume of his voice.

“Sure. Keep telling yourself that, Romeo.” Her voice is little more than a whisper now too but there is mirth in it. “Maybe you could found your first fan club here in Kronen.”

“You are enjoying this.” He is not sure if he is talking about the talk, the situation or the whole case.

“I am.”

The conversation ends but he can’t find it in himself to mourn the loss of it because Scully goes to the bathroom to ready herself for the night and comes back to the bed. He wears his yellow pyjama pants and has left his t-shirt on, looking ridiculously underdressed against Scully´s satin nightclothes.

The whole room smells like her and her even breathing is like a metronome, like a lullaby that pulls him to sleep. His eyes are closed, lying on his right side and facing her as his mind starts to drift away when it happens. She moves, probably in her sleep, her hand or maybe her elbow making brief contact with the left side of his ribcage and Mulder’s breath get caught in his throat at the sudden feeling of warm electricity spreading from his mark.

Oh God. It’s going to be a long night.

\------

_The ISIMMP is an international, goverment-funded project that, working under the protection of the UN, facilitates contact information between reciprocate soulmates that have previously voluntarily entered the program agreeing to allow a scan of their mark for this purpouse._

\------

The latest postcard from her younger brother arrives arrives on a friday with a recent picture attached.

Scully sits at the kitchen table. The house is clean and warm but is late in the afternoon and the light that comes from the windows is starting to turn orange announcing the sunset. She measures the postcard with her hands, the touch of it, its size, the weight as she maneuvers it with her fingers, and reads the words with studied steadiness, trying to make the message longer than it is.

_Hi sis,_

_I hope this card finds you as splendid as I remember you._  
_Your niece Helena turned four yesterday and has recently_  
_become obsessed with genealogy. She is particularly_  
_curious about you._  
_It would be great if one day you could meet each other._

_Love._  
_Charlie._

The handwriting is familiar to her but there are three smiling strangers in the picture she holds in her hands. If she tries hard enough, she can recognize so features of the brother she used to know in the image of a tan, bald man with a slight overweight. He wears a short sleeved, colorful shirt and has an arm over the shoulders of a brunette woman that Scully knows is named Karissa but has never met. Both have their left arms naked, tanned under the bright sun and blue sky, showing their matching marks in a foreign language.

Charlie was about to turn nineteen when the mark appeared and everything changed. Their pastor said it was a sign of God and their parents insisted vehemently in him joining the International Soulmate’s Identifying Mark Matching Program like there was really no other choice. The answer came two months later, from Volos, Greece, and in the Scully’s home there was no question about what step would be followed next.

It didn’t matter the Charlie’s inclinations to pursue a career as a naval engineer in San Diego, or Melissa’s protests that if it was meant to be destiny will push them together. Their parents liquidated some savings to buy Charlie a plane ticket and some greek drachmas and the Scully family was forever dispersed after tearful goodbyes in an airport.

Scully wonders what would have happened if her first mark had appeared on a harder to conceal part of her body. She looks at the pictures, at the sincere, full smile of her brother and knows she wouldn’t have been that happy.

\------

_In 28% of events related with sudden or extreme violence against the soulmate of a marked person, said marked person experiences a reflex reaction originated in the mark. The type and intensity of the reaction varies from person to person._

\------

Mulder has the stack of files about the several — and apparently immortal — identities of the photographer under his right arm as he walks through the parking lot. He takes a look at his watch and makes the mental math; he could be in New York in an hour and a half but Kersh would find out about the plane ticket. By car it will take him a around four hours but by the look of it, it’s not like the suspect will be in any kind of a rush.

He is a couple of steps away from reaching the handle of the car door when an unexpected, stabbing pain irradiates from the left side of his ribcage and his upper right thigh. It’s not a crippling pain but it takes him by surprise making him drop the files.

He leans on the car and breathes deeply for a moment, trying to clear his head, thinking about the source of this sudden ache. He palms his ribcage and his leg frantically but nothing comes of it; no blood, not even a slight discomfort to the touch and pressure.

A terrifying certainty hits him in the gut. _Scully_.

He picks up the papers and gets into the car as quickly as he is able to. He starts the car and drives fast and recklessly to the airport. He buys the first ticket to New York without checking the price and calls and calls, and calls to Scully, hoping against hope that she will answer if he insists enough.

The one hour flight is hell. Each and every agonizing second that the plane is in the air feels like something intangible and precious is slipping through his fingers with nothing to be done about it.

As soon as the plain touches land he connects his phone again and it starts to vibrate with missing messages and calls that Mulder has no time to attend before the cell starts to ring again.

“Fox Mulder?” the unfamiliar voice asks, “You are listed as Dana Scully’s emergency contact.”

“Where is she? Is she okay?” his own voice sounds as desperate as he feels.

“I’m calling from NYU Medical Center where Dana Scully has been admitted with a gunshot wound in the stomach and is currently undergoing surgery.”

It’s not until he is sitting at the generic waiting room of yet another hospital that he realizes he doesn’t have the files with him. He doesn’t have his coat either.

“What has happened?” he asks the nurses over and over again but the only answer he gets comes from his own head and it is always the same.

_You weren’t there._

\------ 

_Nowadays most countries have restrictive laws about the use of the information displayed on soulmate identifying marks. To divulge any related information about a third person’s mark without his/her express consent is typified as a crime in 98 different countries._

\------

This time the movie is Armagedon and Mulder maneuvers her with extreme care so that she can rest her upper body against his chest as they both rest on her sofa.

“All I’m saying is that I have never shooted you and therefore, I’m the best partner you ever had,” he says. His tone is humorous but she saw his red, devastated eyes filled with a violent and almost unrecognizable ire the first time agent Ritter entered her hospital room after her surgery.

“You have held me at gunpoint twice,” she doesn't say it as an accusation but a statement of a fact.

“I was temporarily insane,” he dismisses. “Besides, you have actually shot me once.”

“You were temporarily insane,” she almost singsongs.

“It still counts. I’m the better partner in the room,” he declares with pride.

One of his hands covers both of hers as they rest with her fingers interlaced over her stomach, as if protecting the tender, new skin under them. The tips of his fingers painting random patterns on her skin as if unable to keep steady

“I’ve discharged my gun under suspicious circumstances far less than you, therefore that would make me the better agent in the room.”

“You are also potentially immortal so you definitely win.”

His breathing is steady and under her head, unfaltering and calm when he proclaims the possibility that she could not be killed, as if it were a common trait, but talking about this matter makes her a little restless and uncomfortable, regardless of how unreal and impossible it feels to her now.

“I’m not immortal, Mulder.”

“Mr. Fellig would have argued differently.” She rolls her eyes. On the screen Bruce Willis and his boys walk in slow motion towards them.

“Mr. Fellig is dead. And I’m not immortal. Nobody is.”

“Well, if anyone would ask me, Scully, I’d much rather prefer you to be immortal than anybody else.” He kisses the top of her head then, as an afterthought, and she wonders if this is how they would play along if they didn’t work together or if they had managed to watch a movie sharing a couch without the ever present weight of a serious injury.

She moves, uneasy with her thoughts; straightens a leg across the couch, bends the other and turns her torso a little making Mulder’s arm rest on the cotton of her shirt directly over her mark on the side of her ribcage, the one that professes her own name.

Her breath catches in her throat at the unexpected warmth that fills her and is unable to stop the surprised hiss at the pleasant, electric shiver the accidental touch provoques.

“Oh, I’m sorry Scully. Did I hurt you?” he says in a hurry trying to remove his arm from the position.

“No. No. It’s okay.” It’s as much explanation as she can give.

It is embarrassing and heartbreaking, the way she craves his touch, innocent and unassuming as it is, fearing the time when they will not be something within her reach.

 _He has a mark_ , she reminds herself, he has a mark, because the discrepancy in numbers with hers makes it unnecessary to remind herself of anything else.

\------ 

_The appearance of a soulmate identifying mark is still considered a rite of passage in many cultures with a vast range of different celebrations and obligations related to it._

\------

They hit the FBI training gym at her request. She had been barely given the official medical seal of approval to go back to her normal life when she had asked him for the favor and Mulder couldn’t really say no even if he had wanted to.

“I need to get back to shape,” she had declared as soon as she had her clearance to work again.

“You are not in a hurry, Scully. It’s not like Kersh is going to let us do real work any time soon and big piles of shit oppose resistance only every so often.”

But the sheer determination in her look didn’t leave any place to doubt. “Will you meet me at the gym, Mulder?” she had asked without really waiting for his answer so he has gone to retrieve his gym bag from the trunk and changed into sweats.

She wears a short ponytail that scarcely manages to restrain most of her hair, an FBI grey t-shirt that probably could fit him and black yoga pants. Overall she looks like young Clarice Sterling when he meets her on the tatami. She looks cute and soft and hard and lethal all at the same time.

There are another pair of couples whose grunts and yelps are barely audible in the distance and Mulder looks around him a little nervous as Scully closes the distance between them with cautious steps, her whole demeanor telling him that she is prepared to put up a fight.

He has covered his marks with a couple of layers of auto-adhesive sanitary dressing, crossing his metaphorical fingers that it will buffer the feeling provoked by her contact but is still pretty concerned that he will gasp or moan at the most inappropriate of times.

“Don’t go easy on me, Mulder,” she warns.

He chuckles and tries to prepare himself.

“Have I ever?”

\------ 

__Whereas the percentage of global population sporting soulmate identifying marks it’s estimated to have remained stable since 1928 when it started being monitored, Costa Rica is the country of the world with a higher marked population with a consistent 0.0001% rate above average._  
_

_\-----_

Several unknown, gloved hands strip her down and push her towards the decontamination showers. Scully is far too mad, almost enraged, to even contemplate feeling violated by the unjustified act of being forced to be naked in front of a group of strangers.

She positions herself under the spray and closes her eyes, her hands in fits at her sides as the almost scalding water hits her skin and washes away inexistant, contaminating, particles. Scully hears the soft splashing sound of footsteps approaching with hesitation but she doesn’t open her eyes, on the contrary she presses her lids closed harder and fights to keep her breathing calm and controlled.

Her brain hurriedly thinking about the best way to proceed, how she can help Cassandra, how to get out of the control of the damn CDC. She has to think clearly and think fast because there is too much at risk.

Snippets of images of the night Cassandra got abducted on that bridge cross her mind and she feels a pang of fear underneath the anger, the recognition that she sees herself in Cassandra’s eyes sometimes; the Dana Scully that could have been if circumstances had been different.

The truth needs to be uncovered and the man behind the smoke curtain needs to be brought to justice and punished accordingly for their crimes against Cassandra Spender, against Samantha Mulder, against herself, against so many others.

The water stops falling suddenly and she opens her eyes and arranges her damp hair behind her ears. She doesn’t fully realize that she is completely naked in that moment; she doesn't realize it as Mulder slowly turns himself around and looks at her in the eye.

There is a change in the air then, a moment when Mulder lowers his eyes and she holds her breath because her arms are up and she is positioned far enough from the divisory wall that both her marks are fully visible. She starts to turn round and lower her arms, to shield herself from his view a little too late when she lets her curiosity take the better of her and lowers her gaze too, barely for a moment, just a couple of seconds. But it is enough. Mulder has a vertical mark at the left side of his ribcage and another one on his upper right thigh that match her own.

Her breath catches and her heart rate goes up to the skies in a second as she tries to swallow the lump in her throat. She doesn`t have time for anything else because a couple of men in blue plastic suits usher her towards yet another room and Cassandra is still in great danger.

Under everything else, under the rage, the indignation, the worry and the need for justice there is an undercurrent of vindication that pronounces itself in five resented words; _I’m gonna kill Diana Fowley_.


	2. You got me on yours

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This has taken longer than I expected mostly due to RL bullshit.
> 
> My sincere thanks to everyone that is still reaing this and to the ever gracious [dasku](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Dasku/works)
> 
> If you have any interest in following the progress of the writting of the next chapter you can do so [here](https://twitter.com/mealteraelego)

_While first marks among exclusive, reciprocate soulmates appear always at the same time, in the event of second marks, half of the cases present a significant discrepancy in the time of appearance. This discrepancy has been commonly explained as different levels of romantic implication in the relationship among soulmates, although no scientific study has been done to confirm it._

\------

He is pushed towards another room. He’s still stark naked and dripping water, but the people from the Center for Disease Control have no time to spare him any privacy or dignity, even when the whole setup is nothing more than a convoluted hoax.

It’s not like he has any privacy left either.

The jury is still out about the dignity part though.

He had come into the decontamination showers looking at the tile under his feet and spent the excessively long minutes that the water had been running looking intently at a concrete wall in front of him. He had imagined more than heard Scully’s angry breathing behind him as the pressured water cleaned every inch of his skin.

It had taken all his nerve to finally turn around. It was meant to be an act of selflessness, of trust. An act of simple truth.

He intended to turn around and let Scully see that she was on his skin, to bare his last secret to her and give her another reason to trust him and trust his judgement. He was completely unprepared to see the dark melanin accumulations of a mark on her right thigh, just below the joint with her hip, mirroring the location of one of his own. 

Mulder has never been so grateful for an eidetic memory in his life.

Strangers in plastic suits come and offer him a towel and a white, sterile hospital pajamas with urgent movements.

“I won’t take as an insult the haste in making me dress,” he says dryly but if anybody hears him through the contamination suits they are doing a superb job at ignoring him.

The door opens and closes once again and Scully gets ushered into the room by another pair of suited guys. Her hair is dripping wet, darker; it seems to match her mood. She is wearing the same attire he is and a bothered, impenetrable look on her face as she walks right in front of him without the tiniest fuss, giving him, if not her back, most definitely her shoulder.

He tries to get her attention, only for a moment, with a soft cough that she doesn’t respond to. She doesn't even look at him as doctors come and check for radiation levels. Scully’s contained anger is like an armour around her, like another presence in the room taking up oxygen and space, and he wishes he could say none of her ire is rightfully directed at him. 

“There must be some kind of mistake. I signed up for the aromatherapy treatment,” he comments trying to lighten up the mood before Scully’s back muscles break from the accumulated tension. There is nothing casual about her posture, nothing soft or open.

Sometimes he remembers he has actual training on reading people and making educated guesses based on such indicators as their body language. He even used to be good at it, earn a living with that. Presently, twenty bucks say that Scully doesn't’ seem to be in the mood to have a transcendentally personal conversation about a mystical bond marked on their skin just at the very moment.

“Are we going to be able to talk to somebody who can tell us what this is all about?” Her tone of voice is commanding, demands to be heard and listen to carefully. It comes with an implicit warning; Flammable material inside, do not piss off. Approach at your own risk.

The medical staff exit the room without addressing her question, leaving them alone, breathing the heavy air filled of things unsaid. Mulder feels like he could actually suffocate if he doesn’t start thinking about something else rather than Scully’s smooth skin claiming his name.

He looks round and sighs inwardly making an effort to concentrate in their most immediate problem. “Where the hell do you think we are?” he asks her changing his line of thought.

“I think, based on our travel time probably Fort Marlene. High risk decontamination and quarantine,” she says matter of factly, like the most obvious answer to an easy question. 

Mulder is irrationally glad that she chooses to talk to him at all.

\------

_Identifying soulmate marks of individuals affected by certain illnesses associated with a lack of pigmentation in the skin, such as vitiligo or albinism, present themselves as colourless too, acquiring instead some relief and texture._

\------

“Scully, you’re making this personal.”

The words are like a hard blow to the mouth of her stomach. They make her momentarily sick. She can feel angry, frustrated tears wanting to form in her eyes and the next breath she takes is as painful as if a heavy weight was sitting on her chest to kill her slowly.

She feels so attacked that she would like to punch and kick and spit and bite in response. The fact that it is Mulder the one issuing the accusation is like a war wound that leaves her drained and bloodless. 

Who is he to make such a statement? The man that personifies the concept of a personal quest himself.

She could scream and cry and drop to the floor exhausted from the irony and the frustration of it all but she does not. Of course she does not. She bites her tongue instead and swallows bitter unsaid words. She is not the revengeful type, never has been. It takes too much of her energy just to end up licking her wounds in a dark corner nevertheless.

She takes a breath and a step and looks at Mulder in the eye.

“Because it is personal, Mulder. Because without the FBI personal interest is all that I have. And if you take that away then there is no reason for me to continue,” she says and walks past him to leave the Lone Gunmen’s office.

She is not like him, the martyr-on-a-crusade but she has made her fair share of sacrifices of her own and she will not back down. The truth is far too important to her too to let it slide from her fingers or to look away from its ugliness. No, she will not quit; not for Skinner, certainly not for Diana. Not for a soulmate.

Not even for Mulder.

\------

_Although sporting reciprocate identifying soulmate marks guarantees a mutual romantic appreciation given that the subjects get to meet, it doesn’t provide any kind of relatable information about the timeline of such resolution._

\------

They get the X-Files back. They get to go to work to their old, loved, forsaken basement office and adjust again to their old routines that don’t involve enormous piles of manure and bit by tedious bit, the archive stars to fill up again with old and new cases.

It’s his proverbial promised land, his improbable happy ending… if only he could just figure out how to get also his old partner back instead of this Dana Scully that doesn’t seem to find that much enjoyment in sharing her precious time with him.

It’s late in the morning as they move around the battered house double-checking that nothing is left behind in absolute silence. He had been hopeful when he had first read the file about the case; not a proper X-File, sadly, but the undercover assignment in suburban, sunny California had looked very convenient if not terribly interesting. At the very least he had thought that the imposed cohabitation would make them talk about pending things sooner or later. 

As it turns out he had been most painfully wrong.

They seal the last cardboard boxes and Scully almost smiles at him in this new polite, stiff way that makes him wanna scratch his nails against the surface of a blackboard while she walks by him to tell the boys from the moving company that everything is ready. Mulder looks at his feet and takes a deep breath before heading out of the house.

The truth is that they haven’t really talked since before the mess with Cassandra Spender and the professional, polite conversations that they manage to have now are even worse than any open confrontation would be, but as it seems, Diana casts a long shadow and he doesn’t know how to pull them out of its reach. He had tried humor and a change of scenery but the way Scully tensed and retreated every single time that they had to attempt any display of intimacy to maintain their façade has been heartbreaking in quite a literal way. He can feel it: a crack across his heart that only gets wider and deeper every time Scully smiles politely at him before turning away to look at something else.

They both get in the minivan, which feels even odder now that they are no longer pretending to be anyone they are not, and drive out of Arcadia Falls followed by the moving truck.

“So much for playing house,” he murmurs. He knows that Scully has heard him but she keeps looking away through her car window as the houses pass by. 

There it is again, the uncomfortable feeling of a growing, sucking hole inside his chest.

“Mulder, did you remember to wrap the tech lab equipment in the protective bubble plastic before packing them?”

He keeps his eyes fixated on the road ahead and doesn’t answer her because sometimes he is just a jerk who acts pettily out of his inability to manage feelings in a mature way. 

Psychology 101 always to the rescue.

Scully sighs and turns to look at him and he celebrates the small victory of getting her attention, if only because he has managed to piss her off enough. “Mulder, that’s very expensive equipment.”

“I know,” he says in a humorous voice, “and I’ve been an obedient, little husband and packed everything exactly as you stated in minute detail. Several times.”

It’s an involuntary act. The irksome of his own mean behaviour bothering him so much that he lets go of the steering wheel with his right hand and moves it to press it down across his upper thigh as he has come to do whenever his mark itches demanding attention. He doesn’t think anything of it until he hears the soft gasp coming from the other side of the vehicle and freezes. 

They paint a tense, colourless picture with his hand on the steering wheel, the other on his thigh, just over his mark, as Scully watches him and he watches her back through the corner of his eye.

It’s a marvel they don’t end up riding on the curb.

This should be easier. Far, far easier. There are like a million fictional characters to bear witness to it. Almost every single plot involving marked people as soulmates has the same resolution: the characters see each other’s marks, they realize they are soulmates and then they live happily ever after; it a classic recipe, a sure thing. 

Not in their case, of course not. Take them to be the weirdos that manage to get emotionally further from each other after figuring out they are soulmates rather than closer.

“I’m sorry, Scully?” he says tiredly. 

This is another one of their learned routines; for him to act cryptic and entitled and then say he is sorry for unvoiced aggravations that she understands. It’s like the one when she proclaims that she is fine when she clearly is not and he feigns he believes her. The wonders of silent communication gone wrong, he figures, but this time Scully nods silently for a moment and then starts to fidget with her hands on her lap as she looks intently at her own fingers.

“Do you know what are you sorry about?” she asks with a exhausted sadness that startles him.

Mulder takes his eyes off the straight road ahead to look directly at her for a moment.

“Do you?”

\------

_According to study financed by the scientist publication “Dermatology Today” in 1991, the incidence rate of skin cancer is, on average, 0.08% higher among the population that sport soulmate identifying marks._

\------

Scully learned to read when she was almost four years old and fell in love with it. Suddenly she didn’t need her mom or her dad or her older siblings to have time to read her a story, she could read them herself.

She read her books and then Bill’s books and then Melissa’s books.

She was a quick learner, a good reader.

Then came high school and college and reading fast became an imperative.

She really is a good reader, a fast reader, a reader above average. Someone that certainly can read two black coloured marks on white skin at distance of a a couple of feet.

It’s the first thing she sees every morning before fully waking up; an angry, bitter word and a date staring back at her in her mind’s eye, mocking her.

She groans, her eyes still closed as the alarm goes off, she goes out of the warm bed and puts her feet on the cool linoleum floor and feels stupid, like Lois Lane finding out Clark Kent is Superman after all those years.

Before taking her morning coffee, as she wanders around the apartment preparing for work it all makes sense; the you-are-my-one-in-five-billions thing, the Antarctic thing, the doped up I-love-you thing, and then she takes her coffee and brushes her teeth and all the times that he ditched her, that he didn’t trust her judgement come back to her, hurting even more that they did in its day.

No, it doesn’t make sense after all.

This is the person who will supposedly love her the most but every morning he smiles politely at her as she enters the basement office that doesn’t seem to ever have enough room for her to claim as her own, and the sentence “Scully, you’re making this personal” resonates inside her head, cutting her like a hundred of invisible paper cuts.

Maybe the date wasn’t about her, although it matches the location of her own mark. Maybe the day that she came back to work after her abduction has another significant meaning to somebody else, somebody who is Mulder’s real soulmate.

That would certainly make much more sense.

She takes the long due paperwork as he looks through almost burn pieces of old files and tries to make enough sense of them to classify them.

The truth is this: she lets go of her angry resentment towards Diana Fowley because it takes too much of her energy to maintain it. It grants her a credit that she most definitely doesn’t deserve but she can’t do the same for Mulder. There is a restless, quiet, sad aggravation underneath all their perfectly civil conversations that she can’t shake off.

“Hey Scully, take a look at this.” Mulder holds what looks like a partial burned picture of an autopsy and she takes a couple of steps towards the desk to take a better look. “Does this look like the Toom’s case to you?”

She goes to take the picture and her finger brush against his. It is the briefest of touches but she has been so careful to avoid any contact with his skin lately that it makes her jump in her own skin a little bit.

She goes to the flexo to observe carefully the subtle anomalies of the liver. “Yes, it looks like it.”

She leaves the picture back on the desk and plans on making a tactic retreat when his hand on her sleeved arm makes her stop. He looks up at her from his seat with huge, puppy eyes that reminds her of a thousand other days.

“Thanks,” he says with eyes full of meaning and she smiles politely and nods, just not quite as she has done a thousand times before.

\------

_Several studies made along the last two decades of the 20th century support the theory that as soulmate identifying marks refer to a particular emotional bond, the incidence rate of marks among asexual or not sexualy active individuals is the same as in the rest of the population. There has been no formal research on the topic._

\------

Florida had seemed like a good idea at the time. 

He had come back from a completely insipid, perfectly civil, hell of a work day to find the answer machine lighting up like a beacon and Arthur Dale’s words about an X-File in the middle of a hurricane had sounded like celestial music to his ears; Scully and him, together back in the field, against the forces of nature. Twenty four hours later with a sore throat and seemingly perpetually wet clothes, the closed airport and wretched highways it all seems to somehow have lost its allure.

“I’m very sorry, sir, but your flight to Washington D.C. has been delayed again. I’m afraid it’s not scheduled to take off until tomorrow afternoon.” The ground hostess offers him a sympathetic smile and he just returns it out of habit. “We can offer you compensation for the inconvenience, let me check your ticket conditions.”

Knowing the kind of budget the bureau handles to buy plane tickets he doesn’t have much hope in the form of suitable compensation for their current troubles. Twenty feet away, Scully sits in an airport plastic chair looking as tired and miserable as he feels. Her hair, not completely dried looks darker and curlier than usual as she checks the reception of her cell phone.

“Mr. Mulder, we can offer you a voucher that would cover a dinner and a breakfast in any establishment of the airport for each ticket or you can combine the compensation for both tickets and the company will pay up to a night in a standard room at the hotel close to airport. Breakfast not included.”

“We’ll take the room, thank you.” It surprises even him how quickly he answers, how eager his voice sounds. He should have consulted Scully but he tries to justify himself by rationalizing that it’s the wet, cold part of him that needs some rest who made the choice and not the one dying to share a bed with Scully.

He has never been that good at rationalizing anyway.

He graciously takes the piece of paper that will grant them a cheap hotel key room and goes to meet Scully.

“Any luck?” she asks as he approaches.

“The flight won’t leave until tomorrow but they are offering a room in the airport hotel for the inconveniences.”

He waves the sheet of paper in front of her like a peace offering.

“Just one?” she asks, there is not a trace of playfulness in her voice but the icy edge of past weeks is also absent.

“Crappy Bureau budget.”

“Of course.” She sighs resigned but like it’s not the worst thing that could happen to her so Mulder will take his victories where he can. “Okay, lead the way Mulder.”

They don’t have a lot of baggage and none that it is not absolutely soaked so they both carry their uncharacteristically heavy bags across the terminal and towards their accommodation for the night with a tedious demeanor.

The room turns out to be similar to every other room they have stayed in along the years. A bed, a TV, a wardrobe, a chair, a desk and a bathroom but the loud sound of their bags hitting the ground suddenly takes so much space that the room feels tiny and suffocating and he can’t really blame Scully for fleeing to the bathroom under the premise of a hot shower.

He turns the TV on and tries to find a dry change of clothes in his bag. He takes his shoes and socks off and looks for the remote as he wonders which side of the bed to take. Scully usually prefers to sleep facing the door but in this case it is located in front of the bed and at equal distance of either side. He sighs, and goes to lie on the left side without removing the comforter. It takes him approximately five minutes and surfing through all the channels available to start second-guessing this dumb idea to share a bedroom with Scully. Things have been relatively good lately and historically, forced cohabitation hasn’t been great for them. Maybe this idea that everything will be better once they manage to talk things out it’s just wishful thinking on his part.

When Scully comes out of the bathroom the room fills momentarily with the residual steam of her shower and Mulder has to make a conscious effort not to stare; her hair looks darker, damper than before and she is wearing an FBI grey t-shirt that is way too big to be her size and apparently not much else.

He keeps his eyes fixed on the TV.

“The rest of my clothes are all wet,” she says in a low voice while she pushes the hem of her shirt down, as if her nighttime attire would somehow offend him.

Sure, Mulder is so offended that he will use this image to fuel his imagination in sleepless nights to come.

He skips another channel with the remote although he has no idea what is on. Scully crosses the room towards the bed and from the corner of his eye he can she the mark on her thigh every time her right leg takes a step and the t-shirt infinitesimally rides up.

Truth, it says, as if he needed the reminder.

It has started to rain again, the drops constantly hitting the crystal window sounds a little like torture at this point and his throat really itches as he tries to swallow.

“I am really sick of water, Scully.”

She sits discreetly on the bed, the sheets covering her bare legs. “You should have thought about that before flying into a hurricane.”

He snorts and absentmindedly his hand goes to scratch his throat. “But it sounded like so much fun,” he deadpans. “You and me chasing sea monsters like old times.”

“I don’t remember chasing sea monsters in the so called old times.”

“Maybe you weren’t paying attention.” He means it as a joke but Scully’s bothered sigh tells him that she has heard it as an accusation.

Nothing further from the truth (no pun intended). He has been close not to make it, again, although this time he doesn’t wonder what would have happened if he hadn’t seen the damn cat under the rain and made the connection, because Scully was nearby and maybe even ahead of him.

“Arthur Dale was right,” he says with conviction, his voice rough from the abuse to his injured throat . There is some kind of cooking contest on the TV and he stops channel surfing and leaves the remote on his nightstand table.

“About what?”

“I wouldn’t be here today without you.”

Seven words, nothing cryptic about them but as he turns his head towards Scully she is looking at him like the meaning is somehow lost on her.

“Half of the time, Mulder, I’m not sure you think that is a good thing.”

It is the resignation in her eyes that makes it suddenly hard to breath. The rain keeps on hitting on the window with a rhythmic cadence, the blue-ish light coming from the screen makes her look ethereal and unreal and the image of her white silky thigh branded with the word “truth” keeps popping into his head

“Diana was there the first time I went under hypnosis,” he says, the words coming out of nowhere. She doesn’t move, doesn’t even flinch and something tight and old starts to unravel within himself. “She heard me talk about about Samantha’s abduction without even blinking and she believed me, Scully.” There is the smallest of change in Scully’s eyes, aggravated as if he had just made an accusation. “She loved me,” he corrects, “not like my parents, she didn’t mind that I couldn’t rise to people’s expectations, she was there, present. She didn’t care about the mark or that I didn’t love her back in the same way.”

His voice sounds strange, so low that he is not even sure she can hear it but she will be able to see it in his eyes, to understand what was like to be with Diana after being the disappointing child of a drunk father and a distant mother, after being the misfit in Oxford and the poster child of behaviorists at Quantico, the weirdo that everyone wanted to see burn down.

“I am not ready to contemplate the possibility that it was all a lie, Scully,” he says. He is not ready to accept he wasn’t ever really loved that way.

She nods her understanding and he releases a breath he didn’t realize he was holding. He wants to touch her — longs to touch her, but she sighs and gets herself deeper under the sheets, turning herself away from him and laying on her left side.

So much for magically fixing things. He gets the remote and turns the TV off but doesn’t get under the covers as he tries without much success to relax.

“I am not ready to trust her just because she loves you either,” she murmurs in the almost quiet darkness, as if she were miles and miles away from him.

\------

_The Higgings effect, described for the first time in the book “Biology of the unknown” (Mark Higgings et al., 1976), is the phenomenon by which a marked person and his/her intended soulmate aren’t statistically more prone to be donor compatible but in those cases in which they are, the incidence of rejection is 78% lower than among those that are not marked._

\------

By some kind of miracle conjured by the gods of astronomy and statistics she is in Washington D.C. for her thirty five birthday and to put the metaphorical cherry on top, the day in question also happens to be a non-working sunday.

She doesn’t remember the last time she celebrated her birthday with a party, or the last time that that kind of celebration held some appeal to her instead of being the energy consuming event that she thinks of it now.

Partying is for people in their twenties with high alcohol tolerance and a fast metabolism, she thinks, so she doesn’t set her alarm clock for the morning and remains in bed until almost noon, loitering under the sheets and enjoying the soft warmth of her bed and the sunlight progressively lighting up the room. 

She dress in jeans and a grey cotton t-shirt under her coat and wears trainers instead of high heels as she meets her mother for lunch because not cooking on her birthday is a present from herself she insists on receiving every year.

Her mother kisses her on the cheek and smiles at her with indulgency as they get seated on a table near the window. She asks about work and Scully, who has long since taken up the habit of not telling her anything that could gratuitously make her worry, talks about paperwork and budgets and the complete absurdity of having to fill six different forms to rent a car in another state.

“How is Fox?” her mother asks, not because Scully usually speaks to her mother about Mulder but because he refused to give up both times she had been in a hospital facing certain death, and in her mother’s eyes that will always grant him a set at her table, a mention in her prayers and a polite inquire about him in any given conversation.

“He is fine,” she answers distractedly as she tries to decide what to order from the menu.

“Is he still single?”

This line of interrogation is not that out of character, the current state of her and Mulder’s love life seems to be an ongoing interest of her mother, nevertheless, the direct address of the question takes her a little by surprise. “Mom!”

“What? I just ask because Esther’s niece has just moved in from Chicago and seems rather interested in starting to date in the city.”

“Life is complicated enough as it is without Mulder dating my godmother’s niece,” she says moodily and her mother has the grace of taking the hint and changing the conversation subject to Matthew’s new accomplishments.

When she arrives back home she changes into sweatpants with a messy ponytail and talks on the phone with distant family and estranged friends, making unspecific plans to meet in a near future that Scully knows will never pan out.

Charlie calls from Greece, Bills call from San Diego and the Lone Gunmen send her a rather sweet e-mail with a virtual congratulations card with some puppies in it. 

She tries very, very hard not to think about Melissa, about her father. About Emily.

The evening is approaching when she decides to treat herself and open an expensive bottle of wine as she prepares herself a bath, with candles, foam and scent salts that require the kind of time she usually doesn’t have. 

She doesn’t need to check her cellphone to know that Mulder hasn’t even texted her yet.

She undresses in front of the mirror taking note of the changes in her body with every passing year; freckles and scars and marks that weren’t always there. She takes a long look at the six letters that compose her surname across the side of her ribcage and ponders on the ridiculousness of being marked with her own name, like a self-centered teen getting a tattoo for the first time without knowing any better.

She turns herself around trying to take a look at her own tattoo reflected on the mirror and wonders if, as the snake on her back, she would learn someday to stop coming back to the same starting points.

She gets into the hot water, slowly, making her body get used to the high temperature surrounding it and completely fails to avoid thinking about Mulder. It’s not like she expected him to remember her birthday but it’s uncommon for him not to contact her at all in some way at any given day and she is stupidly starting to miss him.

She shouldn’t, she has no right to miss him but the renewed tension between them since the incident in the decontamination showers has made her crave his presence harder than before.

She closes her eyes and sees him, wet, naked, expectant. His taut muscles and smooth skin at an arm's length but unreachable to her; it makes her ache with a want that is hard for her to acknowledge even inside her own head.

She is barely out of the bath and in her green silk pajamas when there is a knock on her door and although she does, she doesn’t need to check the peephole to know who is standing at the other side of the door.

“I brought you dinner,” Mulder says with a cautious smile when she opens the door. 

He carries a bag from her favourite french restaurant that he offers like an oblation. He looks enormous in his dark jeans and his black coat, with broad shoulders that could encompass whole continents and tall as the stars beyond reach, while she stands there, diminutive, barefoot, with messy hair curling as it dries and a year older but not that much wiser.

“I know you don’t like to cook on you birthday,” he explains and her heart melts a little in all the ways it shouldn’t.

She takes the bag from him and starts to move away but he doesn’t make any intention to get inside the house.

“Aren’t you staying?” her voice sounds confused and just the tiniest bit desperate.

“I don’t want to impose on the birthday girl.”

It’s ludicrous, really. Absolutely preposterous because he has imposed himself on her in maybe a million different ways along the years, he has imposed on her vacations and on Christmas Eve, on her hospital bed late at night and on countless, nameless nights when he was too excited about a theory that he couldn’t sleep. 

He has imposed himself on her skin. 

Scully wonders what kind of damage have they manage to inflict on their relationship that sharing a meal on her birthday suddenly feels like too much of an intrusion without a proper invitation.

“Stay,” she pleads, her hand going for his on its own accord, her fingers lacing carefully with his. “You brought much more food than I could eat.”

He smiles and tightens the hold on her hand as he takes a step forward.

“As you wish, Buttercup,” he says somehow proud of the movie reference.

“Seriously, Mulder, we are going to have to address this fixation of yours with corny nicknames.”

She closes the door behind them and for the time being lets herself believe that things between them can be just this easy.

\------

_The biritecas, female warriors that inhabited the region of Coctu in South America back in the 16th century, performed rite of passage ceremonies in which they used to burn their soulmarks so to show no weakness in battle._

\------

He moves within the reach of his seat and crosses his legs trying discretely to change positions and Scully glares at him from her own seat barely two feet apart, like he had just committed a crime.

Skinner has a big office; he could afford bigger, more comfortable chairs.

He sighs and Scully’s reproachful stare intensifies, like not sitting completely still as Skinner takes his sweet time in reading their report it’s an offense punible by law.

He is restless, his back is almost sore from the change on bedding accommodations and he figures he has to acquire a mattress for his bed that won’t drown him if it gets accidentally punctured again.

“So to resume the fifteen page report that Agent Scully has taken the time to write,” Skinner says, closing the file in front of him, “Agent Mulder willingly gave his reglementary gun to a robbery suspect which he then used to threaten Agent Scully’s life and to kill his girlfriend, all in front of a dozen of witnesses.”

Mulder almost grimaces when he hears the malicious simplification of the events put into words like that. The implication that he would knowingly put Scully in harm’s way it’s not something that he takes lightly. Ever.

“To be fair, sir, Agent Mulder’s actions prevented a more tragic outcome.” Her voice is calm, assertive and professional but Mulder is versed enough in all things Scully to recognize the slight aggravation in her words. Surely there is some other implication in Skinner’s words that she doesn’t take lightly either. “After all the suspect had an explosive vest and the death of Pamela Hamilton has been classified as involuntary manslaughter.”

“All out of a hunch,” Skinner insists challenging Scully with a threatening stare. “He prevented a more tragic outcome on a hunch. Make no mistake, Agent Scully, as much as you have developed a proficiency in writing truthful reports in which the both of you appear to conduct yourself in the most efficient and logical manner given unlogical circumstances, I have developed a similar proficiency in reading between the lines. Am I making myself clear?”

He is not sure the question is addressed to him too but to play safe for once he answers dutifully along with his partner. “Yes, sir.”

“Agent Mulder, I would take it as a personal favor towards me if none of your reglementary weapons end up lost under questionable circumstances or in the hands of criminals for what remains of the year. Do you think it’s at all possible?”

“I will try my best, sir.” At this point, it’s as much as he can promise. He has always have bad luck with these sort of things; his mother used to lose her watches in the most ludicrous of places at an alarming rate and sadly he has seemed inherit the tendency with officially issued cellphones and guns.

“You are both dismissed, agents.”

They get up and he opens the door waiting for Scully to cross the threshold first, it has less to do with chivalry and more with the fact that this way he can easily put his hand on the small of her back as soon as they are out of Skinner’s office.

“I really think he is exultant to have us back,” he says leaning into her, his mouth dangerously close to her ear to prevent anyone else from hearing.

She smiles and looks to the floor trying to cover it as they both walk towards the elevator and his fingers dance ever so slightly over her back, feeling her warmth over her shirt. Mulder thinks that he could live happily ever after in this kind of days.

\------

_In medieval times, it was a common practice among high ranked men within the catholic church to attribute their identifying soulmate marks to divine intervention or for such marks to identify God._

\------

She doesn’t need any reminders to not forget the appointment but nevertheless there is a red circle around the day in her calendar at home. Just in case. She has to pick up the lab results of the routinary, yearly tests that, if everything goes as expected, would give her the cancer-free club membership card for at least another year.

This precise occasion is slightly different though. At her request, her doctor has added every conceivable test that could address and identify her infertility with the hope of finding some remote chance of reverting it in some way.

Scully has taken many things for granted along the years but she never thought motherhood would be one of them.

It burns her from the inside out, that she never contemplated it before, that she never bothered to check or make preparations or adjustments. With the kind of life she leads she never thought about becoming a mother as an ongoing project but she never thought she wouldn’t become one, just assumed it would arrive at the right time. Well, it seems now finding a convenient time to get pregnant is no longer the main issue.

Her mind constantly races with alternatives, possibilities: adoption, surrogacy… but her chances aren’t too good either, after all she is just a single woman earning her living with a risky profession and an average income.

She craves this piece of herself she no longer has, like a starving man on the desert. It consumes her in a way it never did before Emily, as if someone had put her at the end of a rope and she had just realized that she is about fall into the abyss to be forever ditched. 

_Are you prepared to be a mother?_ , a nagging part of herself asks, _look at your life, look at your choices, how does a baby fit in all that?_ , it insists; but she wants so hard to have that possibility back, to make the choice, to decide that she discards all her doubts with relative easiness.

She looks at the red circle around the day on the calendar and closes her eyes with a silent prayer on her lips that she hopes God will attend.

\------

_It is estimated that in average, in 80% of the documented trials for sorcery and witchcraft the accused’s soulmarks were labeled as “devil’s marks.”_

\------

Mulder knocks on the door and waits for the sound of the five security bolts unlocking before sighing dramatically as the door opens in front of him.

“So what are the big news?”

Frohike takes a long look at him up and down and grimaces ungracefully.

“You look like crap, Mulder,” he says ushering him inside.

“Aw, thanks.” He drags his steps not bothering to cover in the least his bad mood. “With such a way with compliments it’s a wonder women don’t fall right at your feet.”

“I know, it must be an X-File.”

Mulder leaves the folder he is carrying over the nearest horizontal surface and claims a stool, sitting on it with a weariness that he feels in every cell of his body. It has been a long week of reports, forms and statements to get his gun back after the mess at the bank, he won't have the new mattress until next tuesday and his carpet still smells like humidity and mold after the little inundation caused by his waterbed last Monday.

He takes a look around; there are more colorful, unidentified, plastic bottles and containers around and less Gunmen than usual. “Where are Langly and Byers?”

“It is cleaning day. They are running uncharacteristically late,” says Frohike annoyed.

Mulder can sympathize with the absentees. If he had to clean this place he would definitely run late forever.

Frohike produces a file seemingly out of thin air and puts it in front of him with a very disturbing curtsy. There are newspaper clippings inside, a convention flyer, some internet board printed conversations and a couple of very blurred pictures, he really isn’t in the mood to play let’s guess the conspiracy.

“What am I looking at?”

When he looks up Frohike has a cleaning cloth in his hand, picking up stacks of papers and pictures and moving them to clean the surface under them. “There is going to be a convention in Las Vegas and we have reason to believe that the CIA is preparing some undercover crap to try to fry some big fishes.”

“What kind of big fishes?”

“We don’t really know that at the moment.”

If Mulder knew how, he would elevate an eyebrow in the typical Scully way. He tries to look as unimpressed as he is. “So you don’t really know anything at the moment.”

Frohike abandones the cloth and picks up a tiny vacuum cleaner to clean his keyboard with reverence before answering. “We know there is going to be something to know.”

“Great,” Mulder deadpans. “I think I’ll pass.”

He has enough going on as it is without adding some Las Vegas drama to the mix. Scully has been upset for the last couple of days and he knows her yearly doctor appointment has to be coming up so he is unsuccessfully trying not to worry too much and to stay out of her hair.

He gets up, picking up his folder and turns around with the firm intention of going back home as soon as he can muster the energy to do so, when something on the wall board catches his eye. Somehow he manages to find it within himself to cross the room in four long strides to take a look at the aging paper clipping.

“Have you been travelling through Memory Lane?” he asks annoyed.

The article is ancient, a very inaccurate account of the events that forced Diana out of the country. Back in the day it all seemed like a very well planned strategy to break them down, now he is not so sure. He reads the article for the first time in years and almost laughs at the rearrange of truthful facts: instead of marked Agent Barlowsky trying to kill him in a jealous outburst for dating his soulmate and Diana responding with a similar outburst of her own, the paper made it seem like a fight of two alpha male agents over who gets to get laid.

Frohike makes a weird face as he tries to focus his gaze to see in the distance what Mulder is pointing at before finally giving up and taking a couple of steps in his direction, leaving the little vacuum cleaner behind.

“Oh, that,” he disregards, “it has been there for ages.”

“Not on the front row, pinned over more recent pieces.”

Frohike takes the cloth again and very obviously turns so Mulder has a perfectly clear view of nothing but his back as Frohike cleans over some mysterious surface that he can’t see.

“Yeah, Scully noticed it some time ago and pinned it back there, I suppose.”

Mulder is suddenly completely astonished, and not only at how terrible the other man is at trying to fake easiness.

“Scully noticed it?” his voice sounds high pitched but he tries to cover it. “Did she say something?”

“Yeah, well. She was curious.”

Curious. She was curious. She read the article and was curious. Great, fucking great. Scully knew he was marked, read the article, met Diana not under the best circumstances and crossed the dots all wrong.

“What did you tell her?”

Frohike sighs very audible and turns around to look at him as if the whole exchange was starting to brush on the pathetic part of the spectrum.

“You know, I refuse to start passing notes among you in between classes. It’s a very unreliable and traceable way of communication.”

Mulder nods, mostly to himself and takes the article off the board, more out of spite than for any other particular purpose and puts it inside his folder, out of sight and out of the way to get him into any more trouble.

“Just talk to her, Mulder.” Frohike’s voice sounds so unnervingly patronizing that he is tempted to make him swallow one of his cleaning cloths, but he is too tired — too goddamned tired. In more than one regard.

“Yeah. Sure,” he murmurs with an utterly lack of conviction. If only things were as easily done as said.

As he takes his leave and doesn’t even try to pretend that he feels remotely okay.

\------

_Italian legends suggest that Cassanova sported more than a hundred different non-coexistent marks in his lifetime regarding a similar number different people, women in its majority._

\------

When Dana Scully was seven years old she watched the movie “They might be giants” and became so obsessed with it that for a year she would tell anybody who would care to listen that she was going to be a detective doctor when she grew up.

“You are so dumb,” Bill used to say to her, “you can’t be a detective doctor.” 

To her young ears, the denial that her wishes would come true just because she desired so, was far more hurtful than the introductory insult. She was seven years old and maybe she would have found some comfort for her frustration if her older brother had argued that _detective doctor_ wasn't’ a real profession.

“You are a _girl_ ,” he had said instead, and young Dana Scully wrote seven different letters to Santa Claus explaining in detail why she wanted, deserved, needed a detective doctor set. Her feeling of vindication was somewhat tainted when she unwrapped her Christmas presents that year to find a detective’s magnifying glass and a doctor’s stethoscope, both made of matching pink plastic.

She was way too young to be able to articulate the nature of her disappointment, but as grown-up, Scully contemplates the weight of the key in her hand and she finds herself with exactly the same feeling of inadequacy.

She opens the door of her most recently assigned new office and the feeling that some intangible personification of Irony is trying to make a point sets deep inside her. Apparently, it’s common among those agents that occasionally get to impart classes at Quantico to have their own personal office where student with consultations will be properly and professionally attended without risking any of them getting their eager eyes on open cases details. At least that’s what Skinner had said to her with a cautious congratulation as he handed her the door key.

It certainly has a doorplate with her name and title on it, shining and proud. It’s the quintessential proof of the recognition that she is something more than the name forever attached to Mulder’s, whispered in the hallways and coffee rooms like part of an eccentric double-act. 

It doesn’t feel as fulfilling as she had imagined.

The pack is completed with her own desk too, not to share, not a scrap of horizontal surface for her to claim temporarily, but an actual piece of independent furniture.

Scully takes a couple of steps inside and she doesn’t need one single more to be in the center of the room. The space is ridiculously suffocating, without windows on its grey sad walls; her office is merely a step up from a glorified broom closet.

It’s almost hate at first sight.

There is a phone, files from her classes and the underlying smell of mold and dust.

The sound of knuckles knocking softly against the open door almost startles her. When she turns around, she finds Mulder’s silhouette outlined at the threshold, the light of the hallway much brighter than the one in the office making it hard for her to see his features and figure out his intentions; she fears she is far too disappointed to effectively argue with Mulder or to have another passive-aggressive confrontation.

“Congratulations, partner.” He takes a step ahead with his hands behind his back and she can see now that he is actually smiling in a way that makes her feel a little nervous, not at all in the wrong way. “Skinner told me a couple of hours ago.”

She smiles on reflex and a heavy weight that she hadn’t realized she was bearing lifts up from her shoulders.

“What do you have there?” she asks pointing with a vague gesture of her head to his midsection and Mulder’s smile broadens as he brings his hands upfront. His right one is holding a poster tube that he promptly offers to her.

“I brought you something.”

She takes it with a certain implied reverence and unrolls it. Gifts are a delicate thing between them, they always contain too many hidden meanings so she contemplates the colorful poster and tries to imagine what words are not being spoken out loud with this one. The words that can actually be read on it say: “Students, unlike string theory, can be tested.” It makes her smile wider.

“Thanks, Mulder.” 

She goes in search of four tacks in her assigned office material to pin the poster to one of the dull, windowless walls. Scully takes a look around. Aside from the poster there is not a hint of colour that isn’t bureau standard grey and it somehow makes her automatically sad. This place has her nameplate, her desk, it’s _hers_ , it should feel like a home outside home but Mulder looks gigantic in this tiny room, out of place with a stupid, goofy, proud grin on his face and it all feels wrong to her.

“I should let you buy me a drink to celebrate,” he says cordially, not a trace of irony or sarcasm in his voice and she wonders what is it that he sees that deserves any kind of celebration. Still she makes an effort to nod in acknowledgement and escorts him out of the office.

“Sure Mulder. Why not.”

\------

_Suicide rates among those with unreciprocated identifying soulmate marks tends to be 0.05% higher than national averages._

\------

There is a feeling of staleness that eats him from the inside out. This lack of movement makes him restless with the intangible need of some kind of resolution but bureaucracy seems to conspire against him once again. First, there was the paperwork for the aborted bank robbery, then the due date for the annual budget report and they have yet to undergo the scheduled hearing about how his gun ended in a suspect’s hands before regaining full control of the X-Files again (he doesn’t foresee a more severe punishment for his actions than a couple of metaphorical wrist slaps and the board making his partner promise that she will walk him with a leash in the foreseeable future).

In the meantime, Scully starts to use her office to prepare her classes so he is left alone in the basement for vast amounts of time, with little to do other than meticulously try to recover degraded and burned old files. The work is slow and tedious and the mechanic nature of the process leaves his mind to wander and wonder with little restraint. It always ends up revisiting the same image over and over again: Scully’s pristine, soft thigh, naked, marked and completely out of his reach.

He knows his way around obsessive tendencies enough to recognize it in every dream in which her unclothed body makes a stellar appearance.

It’s not about lust. Not _only_ about lust. It is the mix of certainty and doubt that drives him insane; “Truth” could mean so many things, could be important to so many people that it barely seems fair for it to be a word deserving of a soulmark. It is a far too elusive concept — he would know — to definitely identify someone.

He absentmindedly touches his upper thigh where his own mark resides and tries to find reassurance in the way her marks’ location matches his, but Scully is too far away from him to find any kind of comfort, a couple of stair flights and a long hallway separates them and with every added inch his insecurities eat him alive.

What if their matching mark’s location is nothing more than a coincidence? A statistical miracle and nothing more, after all, there are almost six billion people in the world and the human body feels too limited in extension to accommodate an infinite number of places to hold marks. There must be some documented coincidences, right? Somewhere, maybe among those burned files.

He remembers in detail her body under the spray of the decontamination shower and although his vision angle and the limited illumination didn’t allow him to visually register every inch of her skin, he thinks he would have known if Scully had a mark in the side of her torso too, he would have caught a glimpse of it, probably. He is pretty certain Scully wouldn't have exposed both her sides elevating her arms to put her hair behind her ears if there was a chance for him to unearth one more of her precious, private secrets.

Ironically, Mulder is not put off by the discordance in the number of their marks. Two marks about the same person are a rare thing and if he were to be Scully’s soulmate — as he is sometimes certain that he is, with a level of self assurance that changes dramatically within the same day — the fact that he is marked to be more single-mindedly focused in his feelings for her rather than the other way around feels like the most reasonable conclusion than anyone could have ever reached.

There is a solution to his uncertainties, though, and his mind is always only too happy to oblige imagining it. He shudders remembering astray, unintended touches, the way his body has reacted to Scully’s delicate fingers barely over his ribcage mark, even with clothes separating their skins, and daydreams of kissing her; devouring her lips with dedicated intent until they are full and warm, slightly swollen, red and wet and parted under him as he coaxes her to walk back with their eyes never breaking contact. He imagines his fingers grabbing her dress shirt and pulling it up and out of the waist of her skirt while she steps back until there is no place to keep walking. Slowly, careful not to touch her warm skin as she lets her body rest against the wall he would put his hands on her bare waist and very gently his right hand would start to reach up, his fingers caressing the soft skin as they go and he would know for sure, the very moment his skin would touch her unclothed skin he would be looking at her eyes and they would go wide and dark with lust and he would kiss her as the sensation takes her breath away from her lungs.

Yes. He would most definitely know for sure.

There are days in which his brain becomes rather insistent that everything in the world would   
make sense if only Scully would let him grope her properly — which frankly it’s not such a novelty. The problem is that he is no longer sure if those are really good days or terribly bad ones.

\------

_The Talmud encourages jew marked women to keep their soulmarks unseen outside the intimacy of the household; this is usually accomplished through the use of makeup or clothing. The piece of cloth that is in direct contact with the mark and covers it receives the name of צניעות, loosely translated as “modesty”._

\------

They leave Karin’s house at 4:05 in the morning, paramedics, forensics and the local police department buzzing around the crime scene almost frantically, but as far as the X-Files or the FBI concerns, there is nothing else for them to do there.

Mulder looks exhausted as he observes with sadness a couple of agents from the forensic team work around the bodies covered with first aid blankets and Scully puts her hand on his arm trying to get his attention. She leaves it there for a couple of seconds and when it’s clear that he doesn’t intend to look her way, she just lets her hand slide over his arm until she reaches his hand and entangles her fingers with his cold ones, pulling with calmed insistence in order to make him move.

“Come on, Mulder. Let’s go.”

Scully takes the keys and unlocks the car for them to get inside the vehicle but hesitates before starting the motor and instead, turns herself a little in order to look at Mulder under the dim car light.

“Are you alright, Mulder?”

On the passenger seat, he remains quiet for a moment and Scully can feel the waves of sorrow and fatigue emanating from him and expanding, filling the air among them, filling her lungs as she breathes in.

“I think—” His voice doesn’t break but he takes a deep breath anyway before starting again. “I think that she would still be alive if I had done my job better.”

Scully thinks it’s a nice idea, this concept of his that it is within their power to save anybody they encounter, but it is nothing more than wishful thinking coming from a drained mind. Maybe any other day of the week he would be able to recognize what they both know to be the truth; there are people who can’t be saved, the are people who don’t deserve to be saved and there are people who don’t want to be saved. Scully doesn’t pretend that she fully understands Karin’s motives but she knows that the woman belonged in the later group.

“I think that Karin Berquist was a very intelligent woman who completely understood the consequences of her acts. Let’s not belittle the sacrifice she made by pretending it wasn’t her choice.”

Mulder nods once, resigned as he lets a big puff of air leave his body, reclines his head against the headrest and closes his eyes, which is probably the best decision any of them has made recently. 

Scully takes her cue and starts the car to drive them to the hotel they are staying in. They still have to make arrangements to go back to Washington D.C but it is too late — or too early — to worry about that. They can try to buy plane tickets after catching up on some hours of sleep.

“I failed to see how much she wanted my attention,” says Mulder out of the blue, breaking the precarious silence of the car and for a moment she is tempted to make a joke about the continuous misinterpretation of women interest in him and his motives, but it feels like it is still too soon. On more than one accounts.

“I’m not sure she wanted your attention.” That seems like the high school version of what Scully thinks it’s the truth. “I believe she wanted to feel understood by someone she was fond of.”

Mulder sighs soundly, his eyes still closed and still leaning against the headrest.

“I barely knew her, Scully,” he says sounding terribly tired.

The road ahead is dark and straight. It could be any road they have travelled before but she keeps her eyes focused ahead. “Maybe she knew you.”

This time the silence filling the car is dense and heavy, and Scully feels the increasing pressure of her conscience pushing her to tell Mulder about the mark on Karin’s left clavicle, dark, neat and unmistakeable when she first examined the body. She is not sure what good could make him to know that Karin had the name of his sister on her body but she will tell him anyway. 

Tomorrow. When the weariness, and maybe some of the sadness will have worn off.

“I thought you didn’t liked Karin, Scully.”

He looks at her. She knows he is looking at her, but she can’t find anything appropriate to say because sharing that she can relate to Karin’s unreciprocated love for him seems rather unfair and mean given the circumstances.

“I’ve realized that we had more in common than I first was able to recognize.”

Mulder smiles sideways with humor bright in his eyes as she looks at him tearing her eyes from the road briefly. 

“You like dogs too.”

“I do. Although maybe not that many at once,” she says resisting to scratch the subtle itchiness of her marks as Mulder keeps looking at her in the night. Hopefully one day there won't be so many unresolved things among them and she will be able to start acknowledging the obvious presence of her marks.

\------

_In australian aborigine’s rites, it was usual the presence of two soulmarked sisters belonging to the tribe in representation of the Wawilak sisters._

\------

He has an uncomfortable feeling growing at the bottom of his stomach. 

To be more accurate, he had an uncomfortable feeling growing at the bottom of his stomach an hour and a half ago, when he remembered that she had a medical appointment around the current date and went looking for her to — very smoothly — try to inquire about it. Now, Mulder has been waiting for her at her office while unsuccessfully trying to get a hold of her for the better part of an hour, and the previously harmless feeling in his gut has since then transformed into a pit of worry that threatens to swallow him whole.

He hurriedly writes a note for her to call him as soon as possible and leaves her office thinking about the exact time he speaked with her last night on the phone and the billion things that could have gone wrong in the twelve and a half hours he hasn’t heard from her.

He crosses the hall to take the less populated elevator to the basement and when its doors open she is there, in bright technicolor like the answer to all of his prayers.

“There you are. I've been looking all over for you,” he says trying not to sound like an accusatory asshole, trying not to sound as concerned as he feels.

To be sure he has almost forgotten why he was searching for her in the first place and if she were to ask, Mulder is going to need a more convincing answer than anxiety over brief separation. He mentally crosses his fingers and takes a step to get into the elevator with her just before the elevator’s doors close before them.

“Hi,” she salutes him distractedly, “um, I'm sorry. I had a doctor's appointment and, um, I don't know, I guess time just got away from me.”

Mulder tries to act as nonchalantly as possible given the circumstances but she avoids looking at him in the eye and that has never been an indication of anything remotely good.

“Is anything the matter?”

“Nothing. No, I just, uh... I went for a walk,” she says, like going for a walk in the middle of a workday was a completely normal event for her.

“Mmm,” he hums trying to play it cool, “then, what's wrong?”

Scully sighs and in the instant it takes for her to start to talk again Mulder reads a thousand and one possible scenarios conveyed in that breathing.

“I'm... I'm sorry I haven't told you. I don't know why I haven't. I mean, you were always there for me during my illness but, um —”

Scully pauses again and he swear this conversation is taking years out of his life expectancy but he smiles nervously and leans on the tiniest bit trying to coax her into ripping the metaphorical band-aid off.

“Don't make me guess,” he begs.

“I was left unable to conceive with whatever tests they did on me. And I am not ready to accept that I will never have children.”

He feels like all the oxygen in the elevator car has suddenly disappeared, leaving his lungs hurting and starving for new air. He looks down to the floor as if trying to discern if the unexpected turn in conversation is a best or worst case scenario. The elevator dings, the doors open to the basement and as he walks out he can feel the accumulated guilt of every day gone without him telling her adding dead weight to his dragging steps.

“Scully, there's, um, there's something I haven't told you either and I hope you, uh, forgive me and understand why I would have kept it from you.”

The unforeseen consequences of the things they haven’t told each other could fill oceans in uncharted worlds and he wonders briefly where it all began, when and why.

“What?” Scully’s voice sounds small and breakable and Mulder would pay in pounds of flesh to never be the cause of it again.

“During my investigation into your illness I found out the reason why you were left barren. Your ova were taken from you and stored in a government lab.”

“What?” Scully’s look of shock is like an accusation in itself and he tries to swallow the lump in his throat. The elevator doors begin to close and for a moment Mulder thinks this is going to be yet another one of their unfinished conversation but she puts up her hand to stop them and he is unsure if he is glad or not that they are going to keep talking. “You found them?”

“I took them directly to a specialist who would tell me if they were okay.”

“I don't believe this.”

“Scully, you were deathly ill, and I—” the excuse sounds weak and patronizing even to his own ears. “I couldn't bear to give you another piece of bad news.”

Scully looks at him with piercing hurt eyes that pains him like a ton of tiny knives carving his insides and he remembers why he has cowardly postponed this conversation for so long.

“Is that what it was? It was bad news?”

Sometimes he feels like there is no other kind of news for them.

“The doctor said that the ova weren't viable.”

“I want a second opinion,” she says with resolution as the elevator doors close between them.

He starts to walk to the office, his hands inside his front pockets and his gaze a little lost in the infinity of the barely illuminated hallway ahead, praying to Gods he doesn’t believe in to spare her another heartbreak.

\------

_It is estimated that the global black market related to soulmarks (included but not limited to products that claim to be able to delete or create soulmarks) moves around 100 billion dollars yearly, ranking 4th just below drugs, prostitution and illegal weapons._

\------

Scully hides in the tiny office that she hates and buries herself under the biggest mountain of paperwork she manages to procure: papers to grade, scientific journals to check, Quantico classes to prepare, closed-case rate reports...

She sits behind her bureau standard sized desk that looks enormous in the small room and reads four times the same page without taking in the meaning of a single word. If she was in any other mood she might have said it was an X-File.

She eyes the cell phone that rest on a corner of the table, daring it to ring for a couple of minutes before she momentarily gives up and takes a deep breath, trying to conjure a magical calm that she doesn’t feel. The situation is starting to become ridiculous. She is starting to become ridiculous. 

She finally gives up and checks her phone for the seventh time in the last half hour in search of nonexistent missed calls before deciding to take a break from everything. She stands up but realizes that her office has literally no space for her to pace so maybe she should change her course of action and call her mother to check on her instead, or even her brother. Anything in order to keep her mind occupied and far away from the call she is to receive within the week.

What remains of her ova are being tested and probed in some anonymous lab and it feels like the most decisive moment in her life although intellectually she knows it is not. She can still become a mother, there are other options — multiple options — still available to her, but a little voice within herself says that none of those options would give her back a portion of what faceless, unnamed men had dared to take from her.

She looks around the grey walls looking for something to distract her, a sign, a way out of this constant state of nervous tension that it’s going to end up being very profitable for her chiropractor. But there is nothing for her there, nothing but gray paint and the colorful poster Mulder gave to her that leads to a another whole set of anxieties.

Scully is not sure why but she can’t face him right now and he seems to have felt it somehow because their paths have not crossed once in the last three days. There are oceans of things they should talk about and discuss, more so if the ova are viable and she is to become a mother in the immediate future, but the weight of all the implications and repercussions of that talk would surely crush her now.

She misses him, though. Misses his silent support and the leaning touches that remind her of his presence. Scully misses Mulder so much that she ends up imagining conversations with him more times than she is ready to admit.

“ _Have you really thought this through, Scully?_ ” her imaginary Mulder asks lightly, “ _I mean there is a chance that this baby will share quite a lot of genes with your brother. Your brother, Scully!_ ”

She smiles at the thought of it and in this fictitious conversation she would snort affectionately and say, “ _He is my brother, Mulder._ ”

“ _Exactly my point._ ”

“ _Which is what?_ ”

Imaginary Mulder smiles good-humored. “ _That you definitely need my genes to balance that genomic equation,_ ” he says dropping his tone of voice by at least an octave.

“ _I would say that adding you to anything it’s in itself an act of imbalance,_ ” she teases back in this inexistent scenario, “ _but I guess you could argue that it’s worth the try._ ”

The truth is that when she receives the call, if they are good news (and she is well aware of the magnitude of that “if”) things aren't going to be as easy as they are within the confining limits of her imagination. She will actually have to explicitly ask him to be the donor, there is no chance in hell that he would simply assume that role out of thin air unlike the representation of him in these little fantasies of her.

“ _But think about the possibilities. Think, Scully!_ ” Unreal Mulder pesters her with the unparalleled enthusiasm that real Mulder usually reserves for really well faked alien autopsies. 

“ _The possibilities, Mulder, are infinite as the saying goes._ ” She tries not to get caught up in his infectious optimism.

“ _Look, I’m not saying that given the perfect combination of your best qualities and my not so bad ones our future progeny could potentially be superheroes, but —_ ”

“ _But?_ ” the projection of herself asks already knowing the answer.

“ _They could be superheroes,_ ” he deadpans with conviction. “ _Nobel prize winners at the very least._ ”

In the realness of her tiny office she smiles. She will be heartbroken no matter what if the results come back negative, so maybe she has earned the privilege of hope, the shallow pleasure of imagining only the best case scenarios until she has facts, solid and real, to guide her next steps.

“ _You have earned it, Scully,_ ” imaginary Mulder says, “ _we both have._ ”

And for the time being she lets herself be convinced of that.

\------

_“Corilogy” is a theory developed by Franz Joseph Gall (1758 - 1828) that claims the state of some brain functions can be predicted by the shape and position on the body of a soulmark. Franz Joseph Gall is also considered the father of phrenology._

\------

Working in a major case for the behavioural department it’s like a disease for him. It eats him from inside out, slowly, like a crawling parasite that creeps under his skin, feeding from his own life, devouring every inch and corner of his mind until anything that remains is the case, the murderer and his crimes.

He might have a dubious gift for getting inside these monsters’ heads but the toll it takes on him it’s almost too much to bear and yet here he is, with his own apartment wallpapered with pictures of crime scenes that cover of glossy, blood-red stains his couch and his coffee table.

The Richmond Slayer, as the press has taken to call this particular aggressor, had been active for at least five months before the Richmond office asked for reinforcements and another month had gone by before Michael O’Hara, head of the DC task force assigned to the case and an almost ancient acquaintance, asked him to lend a hand.

The other agent’s eyes had been red and swollen with too much caffeine and too little sleep, the skin of his face white as a paper sheet and his voice exhausted and desperate has he asked for his help in the barely illuminated hallway of the basement.

“I know you don’t take this kind of cases anymore,” Michael had said, “but we need you. We have nothing on this guy and there have been already six known victims.”

Mulder had taken a deep breath. “You have said it yourself, I don’t take this kind of cases anymore.”

“You don’t take them voluntarily.” The threat sounded almost like a pleading. “We both know that if this case becomes big enough you will be called in and you will have no say in it.”

“If,” Mulder had said.

“It will happen. I’m telling you, this sob is clever enough and we are shorthanded. Do you really wanna wait until we find four or five bodies more?”

He had reluctantly agreed then. The obvious, bungling attempt to guilt trip him had had little impact but somehow the combination of O’Hara’s reddish hair barely shining under the fluorescent light and the emptiness of the X-Files office had made the decision for him.

He had no impeding X-Files case that could justify him investigating without his partner and he had taken Scully’s constant retreats to her little office as a subtle indication that she wanted him out of her hair.

It has been five days and another victim has appeared since then. Mulder barely remembers when was the last time he ate a solid meal or how many hours of sleep he has managed to get in the last week, but it doesn’t matter anymore, they are close to catching the guy now, he can feel it tingling on his fingertips.

He walks the short distance between his apartment and the nearest convenient store unshaven and unshowered, his hair unkempt and his clothes too casual and too worn. He looks more like a junky going through his first rehab stint than like a respectable FBI agent but he can’t find it within him to care about it. He has a vast amount of recently purchased caffeinated drinks in a bag in his hand and the pieces of the mental puzzle that conforms this case in his head; that is all that he has the energy to care about.

He takes the stairs once he reaches the entrance of his building, he thinks it falls within the reach of the possible that he might fall asleep on his feet just waiting for the elevator to get to his floor, and when he finally reaches his hallway the vision of her waiting at his door is for a moment so impossible, so out of the world that Richmond’s Slayer inhabits that he doesn’t know what to do. Unmoving, almost un-breathing, he watches her for a moment; her bright, shining red hair and her impeccably clear blue eyes that look at him warily. She looks as impossibly perfect as an unicorn, as inconceivable beautiful as four suns in the sky.

“Mulder?” she asks and her voice seems to break the spell, gives movement to his legs and air to his lungs.

“Scully, what are you doing here?”

“I was waiting for you.”

He reaches her suddenly too aware of his disheveled state.

“You have a key, you could have let yourself in,” he says, although he is glad she hasn’t, his apartment isn’t usually up for a routinary check but right now he doubts it would pass even a sanitary inspection.

He sighs and puts his key in the lock. “You can count yourself lucky, Scully, I can offer you an assortment of caffeinated drinks besides the usual tap water.”

But before he can open the door the touch of her hand on his stops him. “It’s okay,” she says,”I won't stay long.”

He wants her to stay long, he wants her to stay forever, to wrap himself around her warmth and never let go, to forget about everything else besides the glow of her skin.

He turns around to face her completely, the key still in the lock unturned, the bag full of redbull and coffee hanging heavy from his hand and everything seems extremely simple and clear without the benefit of too much thinking.

“Mulder,” she says again taking his free hand in hers, “I went to see Dr Parenti, he thinks I have a chance.” She wears little or no foundation and all he can see are the freckles that pepper her nose and cheeks. “But I would have to undergo the procedure as soon as possible.” 

He looks at her mouth as she speaks, mesmerized, as he thinks that he recognizes the movements of her lips as she enunciates in the same way that he knows the exact shade of blue of her eyes or the very few words she has trouble spelling.

Scully takes a deep breath and looks behind him, to the exit, before lowering her gaze to their entangled hands and he wonders if this is why they always seem to come together in hallways, to have an easy way out.

“I know it is bad timing, that you are working hard on a case but the clock is running,” she says, her voice smaller than usual and he seems to be unable to concentrate on the meaning behind her words while her mere presence overwhelms him.

He looks at their joined hands too. He can feel the world of violence and gore calling him from within his apartment, the darkness lurking, stalking from the corners of his mind and waiting for Scully to go to swallow him whole again.

She releases his hand to clasp both of her hands together and Mulder bites his lower lip to avoid letting out a whimper.

“I won’t take more of your time just —” she sighs and Mulder tries to concentrate in what she is saying. “I want you to consider being my donor.”

She starts walking as soon as the last word leaves her mouth as if the sound of what she has said could harm her.

“Scully!” he calls her to stop her from going away but when she turns herself around to look at him he is at a loss of words.

“Just call me when you have made you mind, Mulder.”

She disappears as the elevator closes its doors and Mulder finally unlocks the door to his apartment and gets in. The sun is already low in the sky and the light that comes from the street across the windows is dim and insufficient. He lets the bag drop to the floor and closes his eyes as he leans back on the closed door.

He needs to go back to work, back to thinking as a sociopathic serial killer in order to gain the upper hand, but there is a warmth inside of him that he can’t just shake off. He has never realized that being in love could be graded. He had always considered it was a binary kind of situation either, you are or you aren’t, but he must had been seriously wrong because he is as sure that he has been in love with Scully for a while as he is that he is very much more in love with her now.

Mulder sighs and absentmindedly scratches the left side of his ribs when he hears some noises in the hallway. He opens the door to take a hopeful look but instead of Scully coming back to him he finds his awkward new neighbor making his way towards the elevator.

He closes the door again with a defeated demeanor and turn on the lights. It’s time to get back to work.

\------

_Fertility rates of reciprocated marked women are recorded to be a 5% higher than average._

\------

The procedure is far more undignified than she anticipated. The medical terms, the minutiae of the process are so familiar to her that they feel like a second skin but the science couldn't have prepared her for the roughness of the sheet that covers the examination table or how cold the antiseptic feels as the doctor carefully puts the three healthy inseminated ova deep inside her.

“We are going to let you rest now, Dana,” Dr. Pareti says.“I’ll come to see you in an hour and if everything checks out we will let you go home so you can keep resting there.”

The medical staff clears the room and as the door closes behind them, Scully has to close her eyes and manage her breathing with slow deep intakes to help keeping the tears at bay; when she was younger and the prospect of being a mother in the future crossed her minds she never prepared herself for this kind of impersonal and disengaging reality.

She crosses her legs at the knees under the thin hospital sheet — the only little rebellion she can allow herself against having to spend more time than she cares to consider legs open wide at the doctor’s convenience — and then she tries to relax and even aims to catch on a little lost sleep

She is not asleep when fifteen minutes later she hears the door open again but she doesn’t bother to open her eyes. The surface under her is hard and unforgiving and the hospital gown she is wearing is too rough to be comfortable on her skin, she is not going to suffer another added little misery by conceding a polite smile or nonsensical small talk to whomever has come to check on her.

She feels the warm touch of a bigger hand caressing her fingers, grabbing them with caring decision and she opens the eyes so suddenly that the bright fluorescent light blinds her for a brief moment. Another hand smoothes her hair out of her forehead and when her eyes get used to the light and her sight focuses, Mulder’s green eyes are there, calming and warm.

“What are you doing here?” she asks but instead of surprised her voice, almost broken, makes her sound alarmed. “Are you no longer on the case?”

She searches his face almost frantically even at the risk of looking a little bit ridiculous. It would be too cruel if he had come just to be gone in another heartbeat.

His smile is more tender than humorous as he keeps caressing her forehead. “We catched the guy half an hour ago.” 

He is wearing a grey cotton t-shirt and looks freshly shaven and showered but she can’t figure out how he has found the time to go back to his apartment to shower and then rush to the clinic in just half an hour. She will try to solve the mystery some other time though, for now, she nods silently as she tightens the hold of their hands.

“Lucky me,” she says in a murmur.

“Lucky you,” he whispers back.

Her very refined-through-the-years technique to hold back tears fails her in the most treacherous way but before she has time to masquerade her way out of this emotional moment, Mulder wipes the tear off her right cheek with his thumb, making it all worse.

His eyes are immediately clouded with preoccupation and she rushes to dismiss his concerns. “I’m fine, Mulder”, she says keeping her voice low, but he doesn’t look really convinced. “It’s just the hormones,” and it is only half an excuse.

Mulder nods and smiles but he doesn’t even try to speak again as he intently holds her gaze and Scully is so glad for his silent support that an overwhelming feeling gets stuck in her throat as another tear falls down her other cheek.

This isn’t how it was supposed to be.

On the other hand, maybe this is exactly how it was supposed to be.

If she allows herself to think about the possibility that a baby might come to be as a result of this day, then she is unmentionably glad she can now remember Mulder’s kind hands caressing her instead of the aseptic touch of a competent medical team.

“Thank you for doing this.” She doesn’t trust her voice won’t break if she attempts to speak more than five words in a row delivered any louder than in quiet whispers.

He leans and kisses her temple with dry, soft lips and doesn’t ask if by “this” she means today or the whole process. His breathing lingers on her skin a little longer as he retreats slowly and if it wasn’t for the strict medical instructions that insist on her not moving at all for yet another half an hour, she would have hugged him like she did back in Antarctica, like it would make all the difference between life and death. If she could move, she would live in that embrace, would breath in the crook of his neck for the next half an hour. 

Maybe forever.

“For you, Scully? Anything.”

In this self contained time and space it’s too difficult not to believe that he speaks the absolute truth.

Mulder combs her hair in slow movements, soothingly, using his fingers for the task and she closes her eyes once more, lets herself be cared for, if only for a few more minutes. 

It makes sense that she would believe anything he says now when she feels their connection so strongly that it’s almost like a physical presence that crushes her chest, making it hard for her to breath. It is not a tingling on her skin nor a diffuse foreign concept forced upon her by history and society, but a deep feeling within the substance of her very being: a bond attached directly to her soul.

“Careful, Mulder, “ she says attempting to lighten the mood, “I could take your word on that,” she jokes with a half hearted smile.

“Whenever, Scully,” he answers, but there is not a trace of irony in his remark. “I will be waiting.”

At that very moment, she believes him.

\------

_Up until Jean-François Champollion deciphered Egyptian hieroglyphs thanks to the Rosetta Stone, Albert Soane’s theory that they were graphic representations of groups of common soulmate identifying marks in Ancient Egypt was widely accepted._

\------

The latest case hits them like a fucking perfect shit storm. 

Mulder still can feel remaining traces of The Richmond Slayer case under his skin when bodies start to pile up again. He feels a little too raw, too rough around the edges to face another serial killer so he focuses even harder than usual on the suspected paranormal aspects of the crimes and throws around the term _psychic surgery_ enough for it to start making sense to his own ears. Some days a monster that looks like a monster it’s the best outcome you can hope for.

Sadly, Padgett turns out to look less like a monster for Mulder tastes, and the combination of his pretentious rhetoric and his pathological obsession with Scully is just a recipe for Mulder to resent the guy far beyond what is to be expected from a professional and objective law enforcement agent.

He reads the novel with a mix of avid curiosity and intellectual repulsion that makes him think of comparisons with gore movies and traffic accidents and with every page he turns, he feels like the evident desynchronization in his usual dynamic with his partner grow a little.

With every word, with every painfully detailed description, Mulder is forced to confront the fact that most of what Padgett writes about Scully seems to be scary spot on, as far as his knowledge of his partner goes, so by the time he reaches the final chapter Mulder wonders if maybe the rest of it might be closer to the truth than he had previously anticipated. Maybe he has misinterpreted all the signs, maybe the tension between them that he attributed to his former case and to the fecundation process was motivated for different reasons altogether; maybe the strain he thought was a side effect of waiting to find out if the procedure had worked had nothing to with that either.

The formerly endearing elephant in the room has somehow become a whole herd.

“In my book I’d written that Agent Scully falls in love,” says Padgett with self importance, “but that is obviously impossible.” He turns to look at Scully for effect and Mulder would like to punch him in the face. “Agent Scully is already in love.”

Padgett leaves quick like a roach with his manuscript under his arm and a dignified demeanor that doesn’t suit him. Mulder tenses his jaw and make fists of his hands while Scully stays there like a salt statue that has nothing to add, not even an indignant intake of air at the public display of presumably private information.

“He heard us talk,” he says and the realization that he has been so focused of the paranormal that he has missed critical clues about the suspect hits him hard, like a low blow. “Last week, in my hallway. He heard us talk.”

The implication that Padget heard a conversation, or parts of it in which Scully asked him to be the donor and has now jumped to conclusions irks him.

“Muder—”

“He might be a creative accessory to murder but he is quite an average stalker.”

Scully sighs and looks at her feet in a gesture that it’s familiar to him; her tolerance for this conversación it's starting to wear thin.

“He doesn’t have any special power of divination, Scully, nor any special way into other people's minds,” he says pressing the point. “He stalks, he recollects and analyze every little piece of information that you, that any person gives away on a regular basis and draws you out adding some wishful thinking of his own.”

He can’t stop asking himself how this did happen, how he never noticed a stranger creeping into their lives and suddenly, vivid images of the crime scenes in Richmond fill in his head.

“I don’t know what you want me to tell you, Mulder. You seem more upset about his transgressions that I am,” she says, and she dares even to look a little annoyed at his angry words. He did found her in Padgett’s apartment when he entered to make the arrest and his blood boils at this apparent fascination of Scully for tortured bad boys that he doesn’t know what to make of.

He wants to kiss her, he wants to push her against the nearest wall and kiss her thoroughly, aggressively until she feels as raw and lost as he does. To unbutton her professional black pantsuit and pull it down until her right thigh is exposed and check if her mark is still there and then claim it with his hands and his mouth until she forgets that anybody else in the whole damn universe exists.

He wants to make her feel for him a little portion of what he feels for her, not in some soulmark-prophetic-future but right now.

He takes a discrete sideway look to check who might be hearing, who might be watching them, but the hallway is empty with the exception of a guard that seems to be engrossed — too engrossed — in a phone conversation of his own to pay them any attention.

“I am upset,” he confess almost spitting the words, “what I don’t understand is why you aren’t.”

She looks at him then a little surprised, with a sudden movement of her head and holding his gaze with her clear blue eyes for a minute before speaking.

“It’s what you have said, he is observant, he is keen on details, maybe even lucky guessing personal specifics.”

He snorts at Scully’s defense of her suitor. Sometimes trying to hold onto her feels like trying to hold water with his hands: if you really make an effort, it might seems like you can do it for a while, but it in the end it always ends up slipping through your fingers.

“Mulder, I can’t really believe that I have to remind you of this but he doesn’t know me. You do.”

He sighs and takes a step back, looks at his feet and kicks lightly an imaginary pebble on the concrete. This fucking case is running over him like a fucking truck.

“Sometimes it surely doesn’t feel that way,” he says, and he starts to walk away before she has a chance to add anything more to his already big pile of insecurities.

\------

_Recent research shows that identifying soulmate marks can be linked to a more active than average melanocortin-1 MC1R gene (Hao, Xìng et al., 2004) but the causes of this increased activity are still unknown._

\------

When Scully unlocks the door of her apartment the darkness that welcomes her suits her mood. Mulder said that he would be waiting for her and the results but it has taken her longer than she expected to come back from the doctor’s office and she tries to rationalize her disappointment making excuses for him about how late it is for a week night.

“Scully?” She sees him getting up from the couch where he has been evidently sleeping and she feels a wave of relief washing over her. “I must have dozed off. I was waiting for you to get back.”

He looks at her expectantly but she can’t find her voice buried under the hopeless sadness she feels.

“It didn't take, did it?”

He stands in front of her but the distance between them feels like an uncrossable abyss. Her hands and feet feel cold and numb. “I guess it was too much to hope for.”

He opens his arms for her and the feeling gets stuck in her throat as she walks into them and lets him hold her, sobbing as his arms shield her from the excessive cruelty of her world. 

“It was my last chance,” she says with a broken voice that she barely recognizes. It was her last chance to retrieve that part of her that was stolen, to mend a broken thing inside of her that now is going to stay that way forever. She feels defeated and as disposable as the men responsible for this intended for her to be.

Mulder holds her tightly and kisses her on the forehead with tender commiseration. 

“Never give up on a miracle,” he says as he touches her forehead with his, feeling his warm breath over her lips.

She feel so lost that she is sure that she will disappear if he lets her go so she goes on her tiptoes and kisses him on the cheek, dangerously close to the corner of his mouth and holds onto him like a lifeline, with her face hidden from the world, breathing in the crook of his neck.

His embraces tightens as her tears run down her cheeks and disappear, absorbed by in the soft fabric of his sweater. She hurts everywhere with an ache dull and constant that refuses to go anywhere else, but her marks burn as if she were being branded with fire, and maybe she is.

She feels so desperate that as her hands grab fistfuls of his clothes and sobs, she would like to be able to blend with him and disappear into his skin, to only exist there and not in this mean, cold world that won't give her back what’s rightfully hers.

“I’m not sure I believe in miracles anymore,” she says, still sheltered by him; it hurts too much to wait for something that is never going to happen.

“That’s alright, Scully, I can believe for the both of us,” his voice is a loud whisper in her ear. “I usually do.”

He rocks her softly for a couple of silent minutes while she manages to find some solace in his words and her eyes, red and puffy, finally stop mass-producing tears. Mulder breathes deeply and takes a little step back, his arms, that a moment ago were all around her, are now carefully disentangling from her and she feels suddenly cold and a little embarrassed.

“Hey,” he says lifting her chin with careful fingers to make her look at him directly in the eye. “I’m right here if you need me. Anytime.” 

He puts a lock of her hair behind her ear caressing the skin of her jaw and then the side of her neck as his hand retreats and she feels goosebumps all over her skin. 

Scully wants so badly for him to stay.

She feels lonely and miserable, and maybe if she didn’t value his friendship so much she would raise her voice and ask him unambiguously to come to bed with her. He wouldn’t fight her, if she were to ask, but she would most definitely hate herself in the morning; he deserves better than a one night stand full of sadness and pain. They both do.

“It’s getting late,” Mulder says and Scully can only find the strength to nod, not ready for him to go. “But I —” he stops himself and she can feel her pulse rising, looking desperately in his eyes for the correct words that would make him stay and give them both the privilege of plausible deniability. “I think I’m too tired to drive,” he says finally. “I can call a taxi, tough.”

“No, no, don’t be silly,” she says shaking her head and taking his hand in hers. “Stay.”

Mulder exhales like he had been holding his breath for a century and the hard line of his shoulder’s relaxes visibly. He nods and smiles shyly, painting a pretty picture of what his teenage self might had been. “I grabbed a bite before coming over but have you eaten? Do you want me to try to fix you something for dinner?”

The perspective of Mulder pretty surely destroying her kitchen attempting to make her dinner it’s strangely endearing and appealing, but she is too exhausted to deal with the consequences of indulging herself in enjoying a cooking Mulder.

“No, I’m okay.” she says barely smiling.

Mulder shrugs and starts to walk towards her couch. “Then, if you just lend me a blanket I will be out of you hair for the night.”

She is suddenly conscious that he intended all along to spend the night on her couch and lowers her head so her fierce blush is less noticeable and goes to her bedroom to look for a spare blanket. Her steps feel heavy so when she enters her bedroom she takes her shoes off, welcoming the feeling of the carpet under her bare feet. She also takes off her pantsuit and her dark sweater to put her silk pajamas on because there is something about silk nightwear that always makes her feel more like her true self, more at home.

By the time she comes out of her bedroom with the blanket in her hands she has also washed her face and almost twenty minutes have gone by. If Mulder has any thoughts at all about the elapsed time he carefully keeps them to himself.

“Are you sure you will have enough with just the blanket?”

He is also barefoot, the bluish light coming from the tv screen barely illuminating him, all long stretched limbs, as he sits on the sofa. 

“Yeah, sure.” He reaches for the remote and turns off the TV, leaving them in a fragile darkness. “Your couch is more comfortable than mine anyway.”

She takes another couple of steps and leaves the blanket in the arm of the couch by his side. She still feels broken and inadequate but the darkness and his warm presence make her bold enough to ask.

“Would you mind if I sit with you for a bit?”

“Of course not.”

She sits by his side awkwardly, unable to ask of him more than what she already has until he passes an arm around her shoulders bringing her closer to him and she leans on him, letting her head rest on his chest and her eyelids close.

She breathes in and the pain subsides, if only temporarily, but enough for her consciousness to start to drift away.

She puts her feet up in the couch mindlessly and soon enough she can feel the woolen fabric of the blanket she brought covering her body.

“Thank you”, she murmurs barely vocalizing before falling asleep.

From the edge of her conscious mind she thinks she almost can hear Mulder answering her, “That is what soulmates are for.”

\------

_Anthropological studies suggest that sporting identifying soulmate marks are the remains of an evolutive advantage aimed to improve fertility and therefore the survival of the community in early human settlements (Arsuaga, J. L. et al., 1998)._

\------

Unsurprisingly for any of the parties involved, Scully throws herself into work.

For Mulder it is as expected as it is disappointing and he tries to graciously let her be as she buries herself under piles and piles of redundant paperwork that nobody is asking her to deal with in the first place.

He looks eagerly for reasonably well documented cases that will take them away from Washington's gloom for a few days, but whichever powers that be are only sending him crappy excuses of cases that would grant him little plausible deniability and give him a lot of hell.

Scully imposes a cordon sanitaire between her and the rest of the word and he works on ignoring the pang of hurt deep within himself that comes with the knowledge that he is outside her line of quarantine just as everybody else. He files the cases and tidies up his desk before heading out to buy a bagel with cheese cream from the place a couple of apples away that Scully favors.

Mulder swallows his own intangible sadness and discards with surprising efficiency any sudden thought about the child that is not going to be before it gets stuck in his throat and threatens to suffocate him.

He leaves the paper bag with the bagel on the flat surface of Scully’s desk in her office as unobtrusively as he can manage and sits silently in the only spare chair pushed against the only possible corner.

Scully barely looks up to acknowledge his presence and resumes the frantic rhythm with which her fingers hit the keys of the keyboard so Mulder occupies his hands and his mouth with a warm and sweet cup of coffee instead of voicing his frustration with her coping mechanisms. After all, he has been told that not everything is about him and that is a lesson that he definitely doesn’t want to have to learn twice.

He drinks his coffee in silence with slow sips, only speaking when Scully addresses him directly. They don’t speak about what they both are silently and discretely mourning. They most certainly don’t talk about possibilities or implications and Mulder wonders how many metaphorical elephants can a room so small hold.

At least she hasn’t asked him to go which is a good thing because outside the four walls that contain her presence, Mulder feels as lonely as he felt when he was a teenager and found himself suddenly to be the only remaining child of a broken marriage. By her side, even at a cautionary distance he doesn’t have to pretend that there is no reason for him to be sad.

It’s a small but a crucial vindication. It’s as much as she can give him at the moment and he has promised himself that he won’t ask for more.

He finishes his coffee and gets up as inconspicuously as he came almost an hour ago.

“Mulder,” she says when he is about to close the door behind him and leave her alone. “Thank you.”

He doesn't smile. To smile at her feels completely wrong under the heavy weight of the evident grief in her eyes so he nods in acknowledgement and softly closes the door, wondering how much time would be appropriate to let pass before coming back with bringing her another refreshment as his only excuse.

\------

_Between February 19, 1942 and June 30, 1946, an estimated amount of 110,000 people of Japanese ancestry and up to 10,000 people who sported soulmate identifying marks related to Japanese culture or heritage who had lived on the Pacific coast, were forcibly relocated and incarcerated in camps in the interior of the country. Sixty-two percent of the internees were United States citizens._

\------

Peace of mind doesn’t come as a revelation; it’s nothing at all like opening a window or as any kind of sudden event. It is like the agonizingly slow process of going through a color degradation chart, until one day Scully gets up in the morning and realizes that the oppressing sadness she felt not so long ago is no longer as suffocating as it once was.

She still has time, she still has options. If she can’t be a mother in the most conventional way she will adapt when the time feels right. She will be ready.

She picks up a non-decaf, non-skimmed milk cappuccino in her way to the Edgar Hoover building and makes a straight line for the basement. The perspective of keeping working in the glorified broom closet she has for an office depresses her more than the lack of the appropriate plaque announcing her name and job title. She remembers faintly having a point to prove, but having Mulder constantly cramped in the spare chair using completely ridiculous excuses and taking her phone messages whenever she is away has somehow thinned her vindication.

She opens the door with little ceremony and goes to hang her jacket as if coming there to work without an ongoing X-File hadn’t become the excepción rather than the norm in the last month.

She can feel her partner’s curious gaze from behind his desk, his fingers fidgeting with a pencil while leaning back on his chair.

“Hey, Scully,” he says after a minute. 

She waits for a moment, waiting the sardonic comment about the prodigal child that never comes before turning around to face him.

“Good morning to you too, Mulder,” she almost singsongs

She smiles blatantly behind her cup of coffee as she takes the spare chair at the other side of his desk.

“You seem to be in a good mood this morning,” he says finally with a silly grin on his face and a shinning in his eyes that speaks volumes.

“Uncharacteristically so?” she teases.

“I just find any display of good humor before ten a.m. to be a suspicious overachievement,” he disregards.

The real fact is that she has seen him exuberantly content chasing leads at ungodly early hours in the morning, she has actually been at his side on a fair share of those occasions but instead of pointing it out she rolls her eyes. “You are such a skeptic, Mulder,” she teases and leans back on her chair.

She has missed him — missed them — so fundamentally, that she hadn’t been able to put into words why she had been feeling so unsettled, but God, has she longed for this.

“Yes, that’s me, Skeptical Mulder, if you play it cool I’ll show you my cape.”

“Promises, promises.”

Mulder grins and jumps to his feet so suddenly that for a moment she is almost sure he is going to procure a super-hero costume out of thin air. Instead he walks to the little table near the x-ray visor and retrieves a manila folder.

“Actually, I have something that I’ve been meaning to show you for quite some time. It’s a scientific article in _The American Journal of Spiritualism._ ”

“I can’t believe you have managed to say ‘scientific article in _The American Journal of Spiritualism_ ’ with a straight face.”

“I even made a clipping of it just for you.” 

“How thoughtful,” she says with humorous sarcasm as Mulder sits back on his chair.

The desk between them feels more like a prologue than like a gap between them and Scully’s fingertips tingle as she reaches for the closed folder at the same time he opens it and their hands brush for the briefest of times.

Sometimes she forgets that she was predestined to feel this way about him. Sometimes she even forget that she doesn’t really believe in an unavoidably fate.

“Nobody fully appreciates my craftsmanship,” he mocks sorting newspaper clippings, weird out-of-focus pictures and papers of unknown origins from the contents of the folder. “It has to be around here somewhere. The title was printed in blue with this kind of dripping font—”

Scully recognises the old piece of newspaper as soon as it slips from the pile within the folder and onto the table. She only realizes Mulder has stopped talking because she lifts up her eyes and finds him frozen, observing the offending paper.

If Scully was to believe in this sort of thing she would say that karma most certainly must be a consistent bitch.

“That—” Mulder starts as he reaches for the old article. “I’m not sure what this is doing here.”

She nods out of not knowing what else to do. The last time she saw that particular piece of paper was pinned to the Gunmen’s wall and at that very moment the hows and the whys matter to her less than finding the appropriate way to react to this.

“Must be an X-File,” she says, but this time there is not a trace of joyful humour in her voice.

Mulder looks at her with a little pain and a lot of surprise in his eyes, and Scully can tell the exact moment his initial hesitation switches to resolution: he squares his jaw, lifts his chin almost imperceptibly and takes a breath just barely deeper than the one before.

She doesn’t have time to wonder what he might see as he looks at her.

“This isn’t what I wanted to show you but I think it is time we talk about this.”

He almost sounds apologetic but she can’t really appreciate it as a dozen different warning signs go off inside her head, making her fight the instinct to get up and get out of this conversation as fast as humanly possible.

“There is nothing to talk about,” she says firmly.

“I know you read this at the Gunmen’s and I’m pretty sure you got it all wrong.”

She takes a deep breath and her heart skips at least a couple of beats. She is frozen on her seat, terrified to be exposed with all her secrets bared to him like she was in that decontamination shower, vulnerable and incomplete.

“I don’t know—”

“Come on, Scully”

“What do you want me to say, Mulder?” she asks passive-aggressively. She has had a variation of this conversation enough times before to know exactly how it ends: with Mulder defending Diana’s pristine honor and reputation and her with the beginnings of an ulcer forming in her stomach. 

“Anything, I just want you to talk to me.”

“Fine.” She stands up planting her hands on the surface of the desk to lean on it. She is far too tired and far too provoqued to play defense anymore. “I just think that the fact that Diana Fowley was your soulmate back then and helped you undust the X-Files are poor reasons for me to trust her when evidence points in another direction.”

“She is not my soulmate,” Mulder says gently, patiently, throwing them off the usual path this conversation follows. “You _know_ she is not my soulmate.”

He goes for her hands, tense and white with the effort of pushing them against the table, but doesn’t stop looking at her with a kind, hopeful gaze that she hasn’t yet learn how to refuse.

He puts his hands over hers, his thumbs lazily caressing the back of her hands until she forgets that she was making a point. She can feel her cheeks getting warm and possibly red with the blood rush caused by her spiking heart rate. It’s all so very inappropriate for the time and the place that if she knew how to find her voice she would surely put a stop to it.

“She never was,” he says like an afterthought.

Scully doesn’t have time to ask for a clarification, her brain doesn’t even know how as Mulder hold her hands and pulls her into leaning farther forward, her elbows bending effortlessly. Their faces are so close now that trying to sell any pretense of a platonic, working relationship to anyone who might barge in and interrupt them would be an impossible task.

“Mulder, what are you doing?” Her words come out sounding small, like a prayer, like a plea.

He bashfully looks at her lips, they are so close that she can feel his accelerated breathing and her marks seems to almost vibrate in tune with him, resonating in the way that architects fear. “I’m looking for a more effective way of ending this conversation,” he murmurs.

It should be awkward, with the immeasurable distance of a standard bureau desk between them, only touching by the hands and the lips but Scully can’t even begin to process any of this as Mulder kisses her, contained, softly, using just his lips to explore her own with intent.

She almost forgets how to breath as she kisses him back.

Her whole skin tingles and the throbbing echo of her heartbeat in her ears is almost deafening, which her fogged mind reminds her are completely overreactions to such a _chaste_ kiss.

Scully has the small comfort of vindication as she realizes that her fears were justified all along: Mulder will consume her whole and she will let him. 

God, will she let him.

\------

_Several gospels within the New Testament Apocrypha, written by early Christians, give detailed physical descriptions of Jesus, including a soulmate identifying mark with the shape of a fish on his left calf. Although the mark has never been acknowledged by the Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox or Protestant churches, early Christians properties were usually identified by decorating them with the shape of a fish._

\------

Monday comes gray and gloomy as an almighty omen for a tragedy of epic proportions, worthy of the plot of a German opera.

Mulder sulks his way out of the basement and into the elevator dragging his feet for efect, preparing himself to face the unforgiving swords of fate in the earthly form of Skinner’s secretary. The five year evaluation report of the department is coming and he was supposed to pick up the paperwork like two weeks ago from Kimberly, which he obviously hasn’t done yet.

He stops by the vending machines, procrastinating in the lamest way possible and trying to decipher which of the offered options is more appropriate for such a dire morning, a very black coffee or a heavily caffeinated soda.

“Rough day ahead?”

He turns around to find Diana’s knowing smile, her head slightly tilted to one side as she contemplates him with sweet indulgence. 

“You always pick iced tea, unless you have a rough day ahead,” she says as she takes a couple of steps and inserts a coin in the machine to make her selection. When she bends to pick up her can of root beer he tries very hard not to laugh at the cosmic irony of it.

“More like a tedious day ahead.”

She opens the can and take a sip, as if contemplating the appropriate way of going on with the trivial conversation. 

“I see,” she says, the spark in her eyes a little too mischievous for Mulder’s comfort. “Has Agent Scully entrenched herself in her little office again?” she asks with fake concern. “I’ve heard the rumors.”

The rumors about Scully and him are consistent only in their continuous existence along the years, and their proclivity to be nasty — in more than one sense.

“You should know better than most that rumors around here tend to be deceiving,” he says defensively. “Scully is actually coming back from a Las Vegas trip.”

Mulder feels already melodramatically done with the day and ponders if there might be the slimmest chance that he could just go back to his office and throw sharpened pencils to the ceiling until her partner arrives.

“Really?” she asks in the most incredulous way, as if he were deliberately lying to her about this . “I didn’t peg her as a Las Vegas kind of girl,” she elaborates with just the tiniest hint of disdain.

The way in which Diana insidiously tries to manipulate him against his partner is certainly not new. She is not nearly as subtle or as effective as she likes to think she is, and normally he easily disregards it as an unimportant power play, but today, maybe because it’s Monday or because it’s going to rain, maybe because of the five year report thing or most likely because the guys didn’t call him and he missed Scully in Las Vegas and her drugged playfulness, today it rubs him in the worst possible way.

“You don’t know her all that well.” All traces of amiability vanished from his voice.

Diana looks at him directly for almost half a minute, the open can of root-beer in one hand as the other goes to perch on her hip.

“Maybe,” she concedes taking a long step forward, “but I do know you.”

It sounds dangerous, like the subtlest of threats and he knows that she is dangling the carrot in front of him but he can’t help himself as he also takes a step forward matching her intimidatory techniques bit for bit. 

“What do you mean by that?”

She smiles, not sweetly or humorously. “What does it feel? To have a soulmate?”

The question is exactly the same she once asked him a million years ago, while they were together and naked in the bed, impossibly young, arrogant and full of hope. It surprises him the pain that comes with the realization that they both are unrecognizable from who they were.

“It delivers what it was promised,” he says paraphrasing his younger self.

“You lack conviction,” Diana bites back.

He takes a step backwards as if contemplating her from a distance would offer him the piece of the puzzle he is missing.

He turns himself towards the machines and inserts the warm coin that it has been in his hand all along.

“I made my choice,” he says hitting the button for the caffeinated soda, fully aware that Diana will interpret correctly his double entendre. “If you excuse me, I have a really bad day ahead.”

\------

_The lead based white makeup typical of maikos and commonly associated with all geishas is believed to be originally designed to cover identifying soulmate marks so they wouldn’t deviate any attention from the artful performances of the entertainers._

\------

_Their mouths clash._

_She pushes him until his back is up against the wall of his living room and her desperate hands struggle with his suit jacket as it rumples and folds most inconveniently in its way off of his shoulders, but her mouth never leaves his._

_The height difference is starting to take its toll on his neck even with her high heels still on so she grasps a handful of his blue dress shirt with both her hands trying to gain some leverage as she bites his lower lip, full and warm between his teeth. There is a low groan coming from Mulder that provokes an electric current to run across her torso to stop pointedly at the juncture of her legs and a moment later she is flying in a wide circle until it is her back the one against the wall and his hands the ones struggling with her clothes as her tight skirt resists being pulled up._

_The drag of their tongues against one another is intoxicating and as soon as her tights feel free enough she puts her legs around his waist as his hands slide from the back of her knees all the way up to cover her ass with terrifying slowness and Scully is starting to feel like the oxygen in the room is not nearly enough._

_His mouth deviates and starts a path across her skin until it finds it’s new home in the crook of her neck she can feel her pulse humping in her ears, at that particular spot of her neck and between her legs with overwhelming insistence making her crave for release._

_She pushes his dress shirt open, not really caring about the state of the piece of cloth and she expands her open hands against the flat surface of his chest as soon as the shirt gives in and everything precipitates in a quick chain of events; Mulder sucks at her pulse point, she gasps and he closes the small distance between them causing her hands to slide against the soft expanse of his skin up to his chest, over his shoulders and across his back. His right hand travels to the front of her panties, two fingers daring to sneak under the cloth and Scully can actually feel her slick wetness covering his hand as he presses his erection against her upper thigh._

_“Fuck,” Mulder says, and the vibration of the word against her skin is the metaphorical last drop that makes her hips hump against him on their own accord._

_There is not a chance in hell that they will make it to the bed, not even to the couch that is merely five feet away._

_She searches for the buckle of his damn belt between them as he nibbles and bites and licks around her neck and cleavage and she has to concentrate hard in completing the task but as she starts to unbutton his pants his hands start to play at and around her entrance and she has to stop and throw her head back against the wall just to be able to breathe._

_Her panting sounds loud and desperate and Mulder is now breathing hard through his open mouth against her saliva covered skin._

_“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” he chants, his hands defying all laws of physics to keep her pinned up and against the wall as he pushes aside her underwear guiding himself to her entrance. She opens her eyes and holds his face with her hand to try to look at his eyes as he enters her—_

Sully wakes up with a start to the impossible sterile whiteness of an hospital room and as she tries to bring her breathing down she takes a look at the treacherous machine that keeps record of her pulse. 

As if the situation wasn't already mortifying enough on its own without needing to add recorded proof of it to be forever stored in her medical records and research papers. As it turns out, fungus originated LSD-wannabe seemed to potentiate sexual response instead of inhibiting it.

Just. Fucking. Great.

She takes a deep breath and sits on the bed trying to think of anything that will keep her distracted but being in the quarantine ward of the hospital due to unknown biological contamination her options turn out to be really limited. If she never encounters a wild mushroom again in her life it will still be too soon.

“Knock, knock,” says Mulder softly and she lifts her gaze until she sees him at the open door of her room, in his standard white pajamas that cover most of the chemical burns — the ones that are not on his face or his hands — and dragging his IV with him. “Do you mind if I sit with you for a while?”

“Of course not,” she says, even if the residuals of her vivid dream, make her feel a little self-conscious in his presence.

Mulder walks around her bed with tired steps and sits in the chair that would be intended for outside visits in any other kind of room.

“How much do you think they are going to keep us here?” 

He looks bored and exhausted, which is a really bad combination on Mulder under the best of circumstances.

“In the quarantine ward at least until they make sure there are no traces of the spores or their effects in our bodies. A couple extra days in the normal ward if the burns are not healed enough to avoid complications due to infection.”

He groans and closes his eyes and Scully’s little telltale machine registers another rise of her pulse rhythm.

“That sounds like a painfully long time, Scully.”

“Well, whining about it is not going to make it feel shorter.”

He opens his eyes and looks pointedly at her probably trying to discern if the emotionless tone of her voice is due to being frustrated, annoyed or in pain.

“I just had another dream,” he says with a particular defiant shine in his eyes, as if trying to prove a theory by merely speaking the words and she congratulates herself in only reacting by arching an eyebrow. “We were both in my apartment. I was wearing my blue shirt and you had you black suit on — the one with the tube skirt and the one button jacket.” He makes a dramatic pauses that she refuse to fill with any kind of acknowledgment. “There wasn’t much of a conversation going on but—”

“Do you have a point, Mulder?” she interrupts before he can go on. They have a little too many chemicals in their bloodstream and too few places where to hide to be having any kind of conversation regarding the dream she just had.

“I think we have been sharing some dreams, Scully.”

She looks at her hands, takes a deep breath and tells herself that what Mulders says _feels_ right to her, either because of the spores or the drugs they have been giving them to try to counteract their effects.

“Mulder, you know there is no scientific basis to support that theory,” she recites, but there is a significant lack of conviction in her voice that is quite telling.

“There was no basis to support the existence of giant fungi with a taste for human flesh a week ago either and yet, here we are.”

“That is different.”

Mulder leans on and smiles as if he has just won a decisive point. “Everything's impossible until it ceases to be so, Scully.”

Scully shakes her head lightly, a little smile playing on her lips at the familiarity of the discussion. “Many things remain impossible, Mulder.”

He takes her hands then and pins her with this look, making it impossible to look away as his thumbs start to rub softly the back of her hands. “Tell me you haven’t dreamed about us.”

The sentence is vague enough but she still can almost feel him pressed against her, holding her against the wall and when he looks away towards the machine’s screen she knows that it is impossible for him to not have noticed the rather dramatic raising of her pulse.

“Mr. Mulder, Dr. Scully, it’s time for a change of the dressings.” the voice, barely feminine through the quarantine suit sounds so sudden that Scully actually jumps a little with Mulder still holding her hands and she is so embarrassed by all aspects of the whole situation that she doesn’t even know where to look.

“We will talk later,” says Mulder, and her mind fills with a hundred of different prayers, all pleading dull, innocent dreams.

\------

_The old lost indonesian Srivijaya Empire had a complex, matriarchal social and political structure in which only older women sporting identifying soulmate marks could govern._

\------

In the end, it’s the dreams what makes it impossible for him to keep being compliant with the slow speed of the pull toward one another. It is not about the sex, or better put, it is mostly not about the sex — although the very vivid, fungus-induced dreams have made it difficult for him to forget about it, to put it away from the spotlight in his mind. What really consumes him are the memory of other dreams: the ones with looks, with hand touches and lingering kisses on the temple while making breakfast in their underwear in the kitchen.

It is the glimpse of that kind of intimacy what makes him restless and hungry for more.

Their trademark status quo feels almost violent to him now.

He has become desperate enough that the idea of writing a pros and cons list minus the cons seems like the best approach to stir things up and try to convince Scully that maybe a platonic relationship is not as fulfilling as it used to be.

He sits on his couch with a pen and the notebook that usually rest in the first drawer of the desk and dismisses sheets filled with old phone messages until he reaches a blank sheet.

‘ _Reasons to be a couple_ ’ he writes down at the top of the blank slate underlying it twice before cringing at how cheesy and inadequate it reads. 

His determinación falters.

Mulder drops the pen and gets up and goes to the kitchen for a glass of water as he nervously combs his hair with his hands. He feeds his fishes, bounces the ball for a couple of minutes and even completes a serie of abs before going back to the couch to keep on trying.

He writes ‘ _I love you_ ’ next, waits for a beat and then groans loudly and hits his head with the coffee table a couple of times.

He is so clearly not going to use the list in any kind of shape or form that he keeps on writing all sort of absurd, mercenary or pitiable justifications, one after the other, until he reaches the end of the page and then throws the notebook against the wall with a frustrated and cathartic grunt.

In the dreams it all seemed so easy, with no paralyzing fear to rejection or unfortunate misunderstandings to complicate things out. If he can’t even write a list that makes a little sense, how is he going to be able to have a coherent conversation about _them_?

He turns the TV on and lays on the couch, tossing and turning, waiting for the never-ending chain of infomercials to numb his conscious mind into some kind of blessed zombie-like oblivion.

He used to be a semi-functional grown up, able to sustain average relationships with individuals of the opposite sex — or something like that — but it feels like previous experiences cannot be applied here. He can only imagine Scully’s suspicious face after inviting her to the movies or the trouble in trying to make a difference between their usual dinner dates and a real dinner date without the use of air quotations.

He sighs deeply with resignación and closes his eyes hoping to catch some repairing sleep, full of uncomplicated, vivid dreams.

\------

_The average age at which the first identifying soulmate mark appears in those countries with less child protective laws is significant lower than the average of the so called first world countries._

\------

“I don’t know Mulder.”

“Come on Scully, you have to choose one.”

She sighs as she contemplates her options carefully.

The afternoon is sunny and warm so the slow breeze that runs by them and stirs the green leaves around them is pleasantly welcome. She closes her eyes under her sunglasses and listens to the park noises for a couple of minutes before answering.

“I’m going to go with Raphael,” she says finally half turning on the bench to look at him.

“Cheeky,” he says as if he were impressed.

Mulder is all long limbs sprawled over the bench in every conceivable direction, his white shirt rolled up to the elbows and his tie half undone in the most stupidly attractive way. He looks like the cover picture of a magazine without even trying and Scully can’t help wondering what would be the effect if she just disheveled his hair with her fingers and pulled out his shirt from his trousers. She can bet it would be almost obscene.

“What about you, Mulder? Which Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle would you pick?” she asks back.

He feigns to give it some thought for a minute, throwing his head back into the sun and a couple of twenty-something runners almost lose their balance after stepping out of the running trail while they ogled him. Scully gives them the well-known, comprehensive look for _Yeah, I know, right?_ and the girls return the sentiment with a coy smile. It’s a small recognition to her constant restrain but it’s more than what she usually gets.

“I’ve always wanted to dance like Michelangelo.”

“I can believe that,” she says smiling at the thought of Mulder attempting to break dance. “We are still two turtles short.”

He looks at her over the shades of his sunglasses. “Well, Frohike definitely has the mutant vibe going on.”

Scully laughs a little, almost a little embarrassed to be joking at the expense of a friend. Almost. “Skinner could be Master Splinter,” she declares after a moment, trying not to break at the idea of their boss dressed in purple robes and sporting big, rat teeth.

Mulder snorts.“I think he has too little hair for that.”

“Ohhh, I am going to rat you out on that one,” she says in between laughs. “Pun intended.” Yes, that would be an interesting conversation. “I will get extra vacation days as a reward.”

Mulder moves his arm sprawled along the back of the bench making the back of his hand caress her upper arm over the thin cotton of her shirt in a slow, steady rhythm that is almost hypnotic. Scully is quite certain that he could convince her to do a number of things just by caressing her like that.

“Oh, Scully. It’s sweet that you think you need any kind of leverage to get anything you want from Skinner.” 

There is just the tiniest bit of resentment in his voice and Scully wonders, not for the first time, Scully wonders if he realizes how easy he has it for someone that causes so much trouble for their superiors.

Scully looks away and sighs longingly for effect. “I still don’t have a pony to prove that theory.”

“A pony? Really?” he asks incredulously.

Scully shrugs. Real desires doesn’t seem to fit in this line of conversation. “They are cute.” 

Mulder takes his sunglasses off and stares at her, her smile fading slowly to fit with the intensity if his gaze. It makes her breath catch, to be under the weight of his scrutiny. It reminds her of baseball at night and ice cream at the office, of late chinese take out on a weekend night with no case to work on and unrushed coffees under the warm sun for no apparent reason.

If she were to speak about it out loud it would sound as if she was dating a fourteen year old but there is no one for her to talk about her dreams and fears anymore, no one but Mulder.

“What?” she finally asks when the tension builds up enough for her to have to look away.

“It’s just— nothing,” he says looking at the far end of the park and blinking under the bright sunlight. “It will sound silly.”

There is something that sound lost in his tone of voice and Scully takes off her own sunglasses and grabs his hand with hers.

“When has that stopped you before?”

His hand is a familiar weight on her lap, the skin of his finger rougher than anyone would have expected of him.

“I think we should not date,” he says, with such conviction that Scully’s Earth falters under her feet. She can’t help her sudden intake of air but otherwise she forces herself to remain impassible, to keep holding his hand instead of fleeing, instead running away from the pain that he causing her.

“Okay.” Her voice is small and faltering but she looks at their hands over her lap and holds his a little tighter. He is her friend. He is her soulmate, even now.

“What I mean is that i don’t think dating would work for us.” Mulder’s voice sounds softer now, his other hand tries to envelop hers now as he searches for her eyes with his and Scully feels suddenly lost in translation.

“What do you—”

But he doesn’t let her finish. “This isn’t going well,” he says like an afterthought meant for himself and then his lips are on hers. He turns upwards the hand that is nestled between hers so that their palms are touching and his other hand manages to travel to her nape, his long fingers entangling in her hair as his thumb caresses her jaw. She is not sure where this kiss is coming from but it doesn’t stop her from opening her mouth to his. Their mouths touch, languidly, their lips exploring as if time was just another variant that could be stopped and Scully could have sworn she felt it all over her skin at once.

“I don’t think it makes any sense for us to traditionally date,” Mulder says breaking the kiss, their mouths barely an inch apart, his eyes still open, as if she would just disappear if he opened them. “So—”

“So?” she ask in a whisper.

“Yes,” Mulder agrees to the unspoken understanding and closes the limited distance between them kissing her again under the warm, bright sun.

\------

_There hasn’t been any record of soulmate identifying marks in hand’s or feet’s plants due to melanin not being visible across the thick skin._

\------

The piercing noise in his head slowly subsides. He can feel the words, foreign to his ears and to his eyes composing an unbreakable cell around his mind, with polarized mirrors all around him: everything gets him but he can’t get out.

His own thoughts are difficult to tear apart from the thoughts of others that come indiscriminately into his brain, incessantly, not giving him a minute of rest or a even the smallest truce. He wants to speak, he wants to scream out loud but he is not sure he is being heard. He hears it all.

Diana’s pleas and explanations are as loud as her treason and he wishes he could put all her words aside, to throw them away and not let them stick to the walls of his mind.

He wants to shout.

_Scully._

He sees her in his mind, she feels her so presently as if they were both standing toe to toe even when she is away. She is the only clear thing anymore, his anchor to reality and to himself.

_Scully._

The parade never ends: unanswered questions, unspeakable truths, inconfesable desires. They come and go and come again, it never ceases, unilateral conversations that suddenly everybody wants to have with him now that he can’t talk back to them.

Scully is the only one that doesn’t want to make amends. She comes to see him and check his medical evolution with methodical precision. Her mind speaks to him and it says _fight_. It says, _I’m not giving up and neither will you._

He should have guessed that he would lose his soul without her. She carries it on her skin. His soulmate.

His ghosts speak to him too, past, present and future. They all speak to him, they all add their charges to his scroll and he is so tired — so eager for a moment of peace that he surrenders.

Only for a moment. Only for the blink of an eye, but Scully’s red anchor drifts away and without it he loses himself completely.


	3. This is how it should begin: skin on skin

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This is like a third part of the actual chapter (already written but not beta-ed and there are some snippets missing), hopefully if RL cooperates, the rest will soon be published too.
> 
> This assumes that Mulder's brain surgery after Amor Fati required some serious recovery and not just a bandage and a week at home.
> 
> Thanks for your patience to all.
> 
> ;)

\------  
_Those affected by untreated mental illness are less prone to sport identifying soulmate marks although the data varies significantly among pathologies. (Johnson, W., Lin, B.T. et al. 1986)._  
\------  
He wishes for dreamless nights.

Mulder is tired of sleeping so much but he is too tired to do much else. He turns around in bed, the sheets tangling around his legs, trapping his ankles with them, restless and troubled as he dreams and dreams and dreams, always the same nightmare but different somehow.

He would like for them to stop but every time he closes his eyes he falls asleep. He is exhausted to the bone, no matter how much he tries to rest, no matter how many hours he spends in bed. This unmeasurable fatigue feels like the karmic compensation for the exhilarating activity of his brain that pestered him for weeks and so he prays to unknown gods to find some sort of balance again.

He opens his eyes and Scully is there, in his room, checking his bandaged head with diligence and prompting him to sit on the sofa for a few minutes while she changes his sheets. He closes his eyes and the Scully he dreams of is hard and brass, cold as a starless universe.

“Is this what you fear the most?” Dream-Scully mocks him, with a sarcastic half-smile and her arms crossed over her chest. “Me?”

She laughs cruelly and the sound of it gets through his skin ripping him in half.

Suddenly Diana is there too, her features not really hers but a sweeter version of her, softer somehow, all clad in white and cream with a placid smile. “I love you,” she says with candor and it gives him the wrong kind of goosebumps. “I would have made you happy,” she insists.

“Yes,” Scully agrees, “And that’s the key of it, isn’t it Mulder?”

Yes, yes, it is. Or maybe it’s not. He has a hard time figuring it out.

Scully glares at him without a trace of compassion in her eyes. “You are not as afraid of me giving up as you are of me giving you up. Of you giving up.”

Yes, yes. He is.

Diana extends her arm and offers him her hand. There is a calm around her that it’s deeply unsettling, like the eye of a hurricane and he looks at Scully alarmed, looking for a way out.

His skin burns, his soulmarks consuming him.

“ _I don’t want to go with her,_ ” he pleads to her partner who is dark fire, a distant figure of smoke as she disappears in an uncertain horizon. 

“ _Really? then why is she here? Why Mulder? Mulder?_ ”

“Mulder?” 

He wakes up startled. Scully’s worried face is all he can see when he opens his eyes, her hand in his shoulder like she has been shaking him to get him out of his slumber.

“Scully,” he says releasing a puff of air in relief. She frowns with concern.

“Are you alright?”

“Yes, I think so.” He tries to be nonchalant but he is very out of practice. “It was just a bad dream.”

“You seem to have a lot of those lately,” she says.

Mulder sighs, he is too tired to either admit or deny it. She goes to feel the temperature of his forehead with the back of her hand and the soft, cool touch of her skin makes him doze off again.

When he opens his eyes again the apartment looks more bright, cleaner and the light that comes through the windows is tamer as it always is in the evening.

The air smells like homemade food.

“What time is it?” His throat feels raw and dry with disuse and he tries to swallow without much success.

Scully comes out of the kitchen area with a bowl of some kind of broth and a glass of water that she carefully puts on the coffee table. Apparently she has no intention of making him get up and go to the dining area and he would be eternally grateful to her just for that if he didn’t already had like a million other reasons.

“Try to stay awake enough to eat something,” she instructs.

He moves with some effort. His whole body feels stubborn and uncooperative, as if his brain were no longer in charge of his limbs. 

He tries the broth that tastes like salty vegetables and beef, and tries to ignore how uncoordinated he is proving to be with a spoon in his hand.

“Didn’t you go to work?” he asks when he stupidly realizes that she is not wearing her usual work attire but jeans and a green cotton t-shirt that looks so soft that it could disintegrate at his touch.

“I took a couple of days off,” she says as if it were the only logical conclusion and goes to carefully sit by his side on the couch, not close enough to risk any accidental touching though.

He tries to empty the whole bowl before falling unconscious again.

He fails.

The dreams are more benign this time. They are both running across an unremarkable beach, their feet sinking in the sand as they try to escape from an unknown enemy but he is strangely calm. Scully’s hair, red and bright, flies in every direction as she runs, panting hard but keeping tabs with his rhythm. The setting sun reflecting on the sea’s surface blinds them but they keep running until he trips and falls knocking her to the ground on his way down. She laughs loud and free as he tries to catch his breath again.

“ _I guess the future is not so perfect and smooth with me_ ,” she says.

He looks at his own hands and they are full of age spots, the flaccid skin making his veins and tendons more prominent. He is old, ancient even, but he doesn’t really feel like giving up running so he gets up with some trouble and offers her his hand.

He guesses his subconscious is getting tired of being subtle.

She takes it and they start running away again before he wakes up to the soft light of a new day.

He makes it with some trouble to the bathroom and then drags his feet to the couch, the afghan that covered him the night before, neatly folded on the armrest.

“You are awake,” says Scully a little surprised as he comes into the room. “Good.”

She is wearing jeans again but a different shirt and he wonders if there is a delicate way to ask her if she has been spending her nights in his apartment.

Just to know. Just for the sake of collecting empirical evidence. 

She would be proud.

She walks to him and gets on her tiptoes to check the bandage of his head. From the close distance he can smell the faint sweetness of her shampoo and see the random patterns of the freckles across her cheekbones. He also realizes that what he had previously mistaken as blush on her cheeks are in fact fading sunburns.

“Have you been to the beach?” He blurts out. His brain still slow and confused by his recent dream.

Scully stops fidgeting with his bandage, apparently satisfied with its state and takes half a step back looking at him in the eyes seriously.

She sighs. “Dagbego, Ivory Coast,” she says as if It was a complete sentence with an implicit verb. His confusion must be written all over his face. “I was there for five and a half weeks.”

The evidence of the extent of his wound makes his stomach turn. He has known that he has been out for a while but she being that long in Africa are way out of the spectrum of what he expected.

“Five weeks,” he repeats. It sounds even worse out loud.

“You have been very ill for quite some time,” she says softly, not at all like an accusation and yet he feels a little angry and bitter at her words.

“Yes, I’ve gathered that much.”

She sighs and goes to put on the shelf some books that she has been ordering apparently, like she was dealing with a particular bothersome and pestering child.

“I was there looking for a cure to your condition,” she says softly, as an afterthought, not looking at him.

“Did you find It?”

“I found _something_.”

She doesn’t clarify any further and he is too tired to ask for explanations he is not sure are owed to him, so he sits on the couch letting his whole weight fall onto the cushions without added considerations.

“What do you remember?” she asks with badly hidden curiosity “From when you were ill.”

He tries to find the specific memories, to make sense of what is in his head, classify the scenes that are there into real and dreamed and order them in some resemblance of a logic, progressive timeline, but the task is too enormous to undertake by his battered mind.

There are only two common denominator in the mess of images, sounds and emotions that pile up when he tries to access his memories: the indistinct feeling of needing help and her.

“You,” he says sincerely, “mostly you.”

She turns and interrupts her tedious task to look at him, almost surprised by his declaration but not quite. 

She nods once, and he finds it funny that she accepts so easily what he finds so difficult to reconcile. 

“Would you stay tonight?” he asks out of the blue, braver than he has ever been, the implied plea as obvious in his tone as it is in his words.

“Yes,” she says too firmly to be the actual answer to his question. “You still occasionally have a fever and that has to be monitored.”

“Okay,” he agrees reluctantly. He doesn’t inquires where is she going to sleep, how many days of vacation did she took or when does she leave the apartment if at all. Scully seems to have it all figured out by herself while he’s the one left guessing.

That night, when he feels like drowning, when he feels the shadows of obscure figures stalking him at the edges of his dream, pressing him into following their path; he wakes up startled. 

The bedroom is dark, silent and warm. At the other side of his bed Scully lies asleep over the sheets and cover he is under. She is wrapped up in a blanket he doesn’t recognize and she looks like nothing he could ever come up with in a dream. The reassurance of her presence is almost enough to make him stay awake watching her breathe soundlessly in the night but his battered brain still demands it’s rest.

He closes his eyes and dreams.

\------  
_Aphasia, anomie and amnesia in all its types and degrees have no immediate or direct impact on the state of the patient's identifying soulmate marks. (American Psychiatric Association. (2013). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders)._  
\------

“Scully.”

“I’m sorry to bother you agent Scully but I’m afraid that you’ll have to cut your holidays short,” Skinner says, as if he didn’t already know where she is spending her days. “It seems like the current status of the department has raised a couple of questions that neither you nor I would like to have to answer.”

She sighs almost inwardly but doesn’t let the tediousness of the situation show in her voice. She wonders if she has ever been this exhausted. She can’t remember a life when this inane, intangible persecution against them wasn’t the background noise of everything they do.

“Yes, sir,” she says. There is nothing there for her to argue. Scully can’t say she wasn’t expecting the call and yet, when her cell phone rings and the caller id announces that is Skinner at the other end, she is tempted to let it go straight to voicemail.

It has been exactly ten days since Mulder was released from the hospital under the tacit agreement that she would keep her physician’s eyes on him, so she had filled-in a form asking for some vacation days and crossed her fingers that the simultaneous leave of absence of all the employees of the department would go unnoticed for as long as possible.

She gives a side look to the open bedroom’s door and goes to carefully close it before taking the call.

“Oh, and Agent Scully? I take it that Agent Mulder’s sick leave is going to be an extended one.”

She looks again at the closed door of the bedroom where Mulder is still asleep. His general health has improved significantly in the last days; his fever has finally broken, he has regained some of his appetite and his vital constants are consistently stable and yet, he still sleeps far more than it’s normal for a healthy male of his age, and she is still worried about some of his cognitive answers to stimuli.

“Yes, I think it will be.”

“Then I strongly suggest you that you consider on agreeing to have a temporary replacement to help you out with the department,” Skinner sounds already tired with the conversation, almost as tired as she feels, as if he had already rehearsed this very conversation in his head half a dozen of times at least. “I don’t think it’s under the interest of any of us to make it look as if the X-Files are easily expendable.”

“Of course not, Sir.”

“Good,” he says obviously relieved, glad that she is being so reasonable and pliable. “I have taken the liberty of taking a look at some candidates, I hope we can discuss them tomorrow.”

“I’ll see you tomorrow then, Sir.” 

She pushes the button and ends the conversation feeling vaguely odd. She pads around the living room barefoot and makes a lazy beeline towards the couch where she lets herself fall on the abused cushions, looking around herself at the silent and uncommonly tidied apartment.

It is late in the afternoon and the partially closed blinds prevent the sunlight from flooding the apartment. She bends her knees until she is mostly seated on her heels and braces herself as the uncommonness of the situation strikes her.

She is expected to go back to work as the provisional head department of the X-Files with a new agent assigned to her and she is not really sure she is up to the task. Mulder is still healing, slowly, steadily, but his brain has suffered extensive and unknown trauma and the unforeseen consequences of it might yet present themselves. She uncharacteristically bites the nail of her right thumb, nervous at the thought that he might need help, medical help and that she won’t be at hand to provide it. 

No. She has to figure it out, has to be there for Mulder.

Scully is no longer sure of what she thought she found in Africa. The questions she brought back far more numerous and present than any improbable answer that she might had uncovered. Crucial evidence disappearing into thin air just once again when she wasn’t looking and now it all seems like a weird, dry-heated dream that roasted her skin and left her sunburned and unsure. 

She is only really certain of so few things these days. Sometimes, as she closes her eyes before falling asleep, she is sure she has imagined it all: Africa, the spaceship, the marks of his skin, the marks on hers...

The soft thud of dragged steps makes her lift her head just in time to see Mulder opening the bedroom door. His limbs look impossibly long and heavy as he tries to blink the sleep out of his eyes and smiles goofily when his vision clears enough to find her.

“You’re still here,” he says evidently pleased. His voice is rough and low, an makes Scully shiver unconsciously for all the wrong reasons, probably. 

“Yes.” She doesn’t explain that she hasn’t left; there is no point, really, no added benefit, so she doesn’t add anything else to the all encompassing monosyllable as he comes to sit beside her on the couch. 

He looks tired even though he has slept most of the day and she leans to check if the bandage of his head is tight enough and in place disregarding the little voice in the back of her head that insists that she keeps touching him far more than necessary — far more than could ever be camouflaged as casual or professional.

He looks at her sideways, leaning minimally into her touch and she sighs and lets her hands go to his shoulders and down his arms before giving him a reassuring squeeze and putting her hands back over her lap where they should be.

“How is the pain?”

He twists his lips in a frown. “In comparison to what?”

“To not having pain,” she deadpans.

“Oh, then it’s still there and at it, but it still beats being crazy,” he makes a pause and turns to look at her in the eye with a little smile, “officially certified crazy.”

“Has any other new memory come back to you?”

She asks casually, she has almost convinced herself that her only reasons for the inquiry are purely, and exclusively medical concerns. The fact that the last thing he seems to remember is from two months ago, before they kissed in a park on a lazy afternoon has absolutely nothing to do with anything.

He looks at her, intently but a little away from the present, as if he was watching a captivating movie and using her eyes as the screen of a projector. The corners of his mouth curl up slowly and then drop suddenly before he snaps out of it by his own accord.

“I guess not. There are a lot of images, sounds, feelings, but I’m having trouble separating the memories from the dreams.”

She nods slowly but it worries her. It has been quite a few years since her rotation in psychiatry but that doesn’t sound very promising.

“Give it time,” she says nevertheless encouragingly. “It will all probably resolve itself.”

Mulder nods once, and then takes a deep breath before reaching out and casually entangling a couple of his long fingers with three of hers. He has been touching her far more than what it used to be usual too. In the short time he’s awake and conscious he doesn’t even try to compose excuses to brush his hands over her arms, caress her jaw or touch her hair and yet she tries not to make a big deal of it, tries to calm down the bubbling feeling in her stomach or the tingle on her marks. He has just admitted to having trouble telling dreams apart from reality so he is just probably aiming for an anchor, and God knows it wouldn’t be the first time that she has assumed that role for him.

“Are you hungry? Do you want me to fix you something to eat?”

Mulder shakes his head lightly and cringes, like the movement is too much for him. It’s almost nothing but a sudden surge of worry washes over her and she is kneeling on the couch and taking her little flashlight out of her pocket before she has time to take a deep breath.

“Are you dizzy? Let me check you out.”

Her fingers carefully hold his face still without messing with his head bandage. He hadn’t shaved for days, since he got out of the hospital, and the stubble is unfamiliar to her hand as she checks the reaction of his pupils.

“I’m okay, Scully,” he says softly, too softly as he reaches up to hold both her hands and smiles.

“You are recovering from an unknown neurosurgery and you still have vivid dreams that look real to you,” she justifies her worry with the same voice she uses to correct students in Quantico. “That is not the definition of being okay, Mulder.”

“I’ve had it worse,” he says with a kind of resignation that makes Scully want to cry for no apparent reason. “ _You_ ’ve had it worse.”

She sits over her heels on the sofa and looks at him. Thin, with dark circles under his eyes, unshaven, and wonders why she feels so defeated when he is right. He is recovering nicely and he has been at the brink of death more times than she’d like to remember.

“That is hardly comforting, Mulder,” she takes his hand and maneuvers her fingers around his wrist until she can feel his pulse, strong and steady. “Medically or otherwise.”

She imagines the solace that they both maybe could have found in each other if he hadn’t forgotten their first kiss, if she didn’t fear that trying to force his memories could be counter-productive in his healing process.

It seems that in the end, the little injustices are the ones that bring her down.

\------  
_The incidence of identifying soulmate marks appearances barely varies among ethnic groups being Australian aborigines the ethnic group that sports marks more frequently and inuks the group that sports them less frequently. (Johnson, W., Lin, B.T. et al. 1986)._

\------

His dreams get less complicated if not less vivid. 

Apocalypses and spaceships give room to quiet half-lights and open fields. Dreams filled with smiles and whispered words under sheets and Scully, Scully, Scully everywhere. The line between asleep and awake that was once so dim and fragile is now painfully well-defined.

He wakes up sweating, with the image of her thigh burned in his retina, as if he had been staring at her mark for hours.

He gets up slowly. Sudden movements still make him dizzy although the absence of constant pain it is an improvement. He showers and shaves, everyday, with the slow, imprecise motion of a body that has been abed for far too long. His muscles are stiff and weak from lack of use and his brain still has trouble focusing on written words for more than half and hour.

He sleeps less these days, which leaves him with a lot of time in his hands to do nothing but his occupational therapy exercises and think, think, think. Trying to figure out what it all meant, means, how everything fits in the big scheme of things. He usually just ends up calling Scully.

“What is it today?” she asks as way of hello, more curious than annoyed, which he takes as a good sign and tangible proof that she misses him too.

“555 874 463,” he says kind of proudly. “I’ve remembered the phone number of that place nearby the Hoover building that make those Cajun ribs. I think my subconscious mind is telling me it’s time to go back to work.”

He can actually hear her smile, he is pretty sure he is not imagining it.

“I think your subconscious mind is telling you that you have to improve your eating habits.”

He snorts. There is a silence and he can hear her typing on the keyboard, the shuffling of papers acting as white noise. “Tell me something interesting, Scully. I’m really bored.”

“Pirates wore earrings because they believed it improved their eyesight,” she says without missing a beat.

“Uhm — I’ll take your word for it, although I meant work related.”

“You are banned from anything work related until you are better. Doctor’s orders.”

“ _Your_ orders.”

“Same difference.”

Mulder sighs. He does a lot of that lately, like maybe he is learning to take some time to breathe, or maybe it’s just that his lungs are getting old and he needs the extra air from time to time. “I hate recovery.” 

In his expert opinion, recovery is arguably the worst part of a near death experience. 

“Then maybe you should remember that before doing stupidly risky things.”

He whines, loudly and theatrically as if she was being completely over-cautious and had no grounds for such request.

“Come on, Mulder, if you behave I’ll bring you some Cajun ribs to eat.”

She has lunch with him everyday, now. Comes straight from work with some take out or leftovers of her mother’s casserole and checks his pupils, his reflexes and his cognitive abilities, clad in her smart suits and her high heels, much the same way as she appears in his dreams (when she is wearing clothes at all).

As the time approaches he sets the table and waits for her, dressed in some old sweats and a tshirt that make him feel inadequate and out of his depth, fidgety, as if he were fifteen again and waiting for his prom date.

It should all be easier.

But some days, he half convinces himself that the mark on her thigh is just another product of his battered brain, and the other half he doesn’t even know how to start to approach the topic in a normal conversation without smashing the irksome status quo that they both have protected and nursed for so long.

She uses her own key to let herself into the apartment and goes straight to the kitchen with the box full of take out, all business and efficiency. She has to go back to work in less than an hour after all.

He goes to the kitchen, hovering around her, letting his finger drift over her waist, her back, her shoulders, her arms, with inane excuses just because she lets him get away with it when he is ill or injured.

“Smells nice,” he says with his nose a mere inch away from her hair as she opens the food containers on the countertop. He imagines that her breath catches but otherwise lets it go.

“So, any new cases?” he tries when she sets the food on the table and takes the seat beside him. The chairs has been mysteriously rearranged so that they are no longer one in front of the other with a whole table between them and Mulder will claim innocence until proven guilty about the whole ordeal as he bumps lightly his knee with hers.

“Nothing that would catch your eye.”

Right now anything would catch his eye. A case about stolen elephant manure at the zoo would be interesting in comparison to his tedious days. 

“And how is the new _partner_?” He spits the word like an insult and Scully stops the precise cutting of her Milanesa breast chicken to stare at him as if he had just kicked her hypothetical dog.

“Drop it, Mulder.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You were about to.”

He pokes at the ribs on his plate with a fork before deciding against cutlery, he shrugs and picks one of them between two fingers.

“I just don’t understand why you needed another partner.”

“A _provisional_ partner,” she is quick to correct, like it’s of consequence. It is not. Someone else is doing his job with _his_ partner, and that is all that matters by his book.

“It’s just that we haven’t been lucky with provisional partners before.” Alex Krycek casts a long, dense, black shadow, for starters, not to mention Agent Ritter, or Pendrell. Or even Diana if he’s going to start on that particular emotionally conflicted path. “And I find it suspicious that they didn’t assign me a provisional partner a year ago. Or… before.”

A year ago when she was shot and almost killed, Mulder doesn’t say, as if pronouncing the words could be a bad omen. He doesn’t even allude to the period when the cancer had weakened her body so much that she could barely take a couple of steps. The fear to that curse is far too great and the memories are still far too painful in his mind.

“You _renounced_ to a partner a year ago,” she says sharply.

Which is exactly his point. “As you could have done.”

She sighs, not quite exasperated, but her lips purse and Mulder wonders why he insists on arguing with her at lunch when he misses her so much the rest of the time.

“We’ve been over this, Mulder.” Her knee disappears from the side of his leg and he wants to grab her hand just to prevent her from going any further. “I am not you.”

Oh. Yes. He can definitely agree with that. The truth is that he was always a little afraid that if he gave her an out she wouldn’t come back, and they both know that there are very few little things that would make him part from the X-Files. Virtually none aside from the person sharing the meal with him.

“Yes, I’ve been told I don’t play well with others.”

“You play exceedingly well with others when you care to do so.”

“Same difference.”

They eat in silence for a while. It’s comfortable and comforting, and Scully’s knee drifts back to the side of his leg. It makes him warm from the inside out. It’s not that Mulder could get used to this, sharing the mundane day to day routines and enjoy the soft, unspoken intimacy, it’s that he craves it, and he is not sure what he should do about it. What he _can_ do about it.

The memory of her fingers touching his lips after she came to tell her about Diana still burns his skin and he steals a glance at the red fullness of her lips when she isn’t looking. He could paint every little detail of their outline from memory if he could paint at all, and if he focuses enough, he can imagine the feeling of her soft lips on his, of her mouth opening to him as he caresses her nape with one hand, holding her hand with the other, palm to palm, like sealing a deal.

He gets the image suddenly, like a flash, in bright colors and diffused shapes. They are both seated on a bench in a park. Kissing. And the feeling is so overwhelming that he doesn’t think it comes just from a dream.

He is flabbergasted.

“Mulder?” she asks suddenly a little frantic, her hands letting go of the cuttery over her plate with an audible “clink” to check on him. “Mulder are you alright?”

“Did we—?” He lets her fingers roam over his forehead for a moment before trapping her hands in his. “Did we kiss in a park?” 

His voice is a little too high to resemble anything remotely similar to calmness and he can see her eyes going wide before the ghost of a little smile appears on her face.

“Yes,” she says fully smiling now.

“Yes?”

No. No no no no no. It’s like he has been waiting for a cosmic sign that already happened.

“This is a good thing, Mulder. You’re getting your memories back,” she says with controlled enthusiasm as he feels like he might be losing his mind once again. “It’s a sign that your brain is healing well.”

Yes. The same old brain that’s kind of short-circuiting at the moment. He can’t stop looking at her lips — they seem redder, fuller, more enticing even than before he remembered he had already kissed them.

“You should have told me,” he says weakly in a rushed whisper, his whole attention still focussed on her lips as he leans on.

Mulder feels her breathing on his mouth before he lands his lips on hers. His hand goes to caress her jaw as he kisses her lower lip, her upper lip, her lower lip again, unrushed, forcing the deafening echo of his heartbeat in his ears to slow down. He almost doesn’t dare to breath but he does dare to lick her lips and the softness of them is foreign and familiar all at once. 

He remembers, he remembers, he remembers.

He remembers the taste of her mouth but the faint Milanesa flavor is new and when she sighs and opens her lips to him he deepens the kiss and gets lost in it. His nose pressed against her cheek as his fingers slip to the soft hair of her nape, and her tongue strokes his with patient determination.

Mulder could forgive a lot, but he’s sure he can’t forgive whomever took the memory of this from his mind.

\------  
_Neurodegenerative illnesses that affect long term memory or main characteristics of the personality, have a direct impact on the disappearance of preexisting identifying soulmate marks. (Johnson, W., Lin, B.T. et al. 1989)._  
\------  
Contrary to Mulder’s belief system, Agent Stone (“Please, call me Sarah”), doesn’t seem to have any ulterior motives regarding her provisional assignment to the X-Files other than doing her job and doing it reasonably well. 

She is about Scully’s age and has blonde, long hair, light brown eyes and features that are easy to look at. Mulder would say that she is not looking hard enough and that blonde is the mark of the evil double spy, but Scully is almost over having hypothetical conversations with her mental image of him now that he's conscious and they are both in the same continent. 

“So, what do you want me to do with these, Dana?”

Scully tries not to frown at the use of her given name; between the four walls of the basement office, it sounds almost like an afront. It should surprise her that these days she only thinks of herself as Dana when she is among her family but it doesn’t. _Scully_ is marked on her side after all, not Dana.

She smiles and searches the other woman’s face, looking for any sign of petulance but there’s none. Agent Stone has successfully helped her finish the paperwork of the last two cases without batting an eyelash, or showing any particular interest in the supposedly supernatural line of investigation. She seems perfectly fine to do as told without indulging in personal opinions about the nature of the department or the cases.

It suits Scully perfectly.

There is a small mountain of new cases on the corner of her desk. Now that Mulder is elsewhere all new cases are either assigned to them directly by Skinner or they are by default assigned to them when a field office puts the case in the system and no other department claims it.

“Sort them out by alleged crime” she says in which Scully hopes is perceived as a congenial tone of voice. “Discard those that don’t warrant federal jurisdiction.” 

Agent Stone — Sarah — nods and puts herself to work without a comment. Scully keeps an eye on her discreetly; she sees her eyes widening comically as she reads the details of the first pending case and Scully has to bite her lower lip to keep herself from smiling.

Mulder always does that, watch her when she first reads a case file, waiting for her reaction with a knowing half-smile and a rebuttal ready on his lips. 

“Does ‘abducted by aliens’ fall into our jurisdiction? I mean, wouldn’t it depend on the spaceship crossing the state border?” Sarah asks seemingly with honest curiosity.

“Technically, it does,” she says, because a lifetime ago she was young and so prone to rules that she still has the FBI code almost perfectly memorized. “We usually take those cases if there’s solid evidence of a missing person.”

“Okay.”

She is mildly afraid that she will get used to this lack of opposition before Mulder makes it back. There is a dull calmness in the basement in his absence that is doing wonders for lowering her stress levels even if she is — on occasion — also bored out of her mind.

They work in silence for more than half an hour until the silence is somehow irksome and Scully rolls her head until her vertebrae crack inaudibly. She doesn’t want’ to pry, still she hears herself asking the question she is not sure she has a right to ask.

“So, Agent Stone—”

“Please, call me Sarah.”

“Sarah,” she acknowledges, “how have you ended up down here in the basement?”

The echo of Mulder’s “Nobody here but FBI most unwanted” rings inside her head. God, she is hopeless.

The woman shrugs like her answer is of no consequence. “I requested to get out of violent crimes as soon as possible. This was the first assignment available.”

Scully nods in understanding. She doesn’t need to ask more, she’s had the chance to see the pictures of a little boy and a girl that she carries around in her wallet when she paid for coffees last week. The absence of any other adult in the family pictures and wanting to avoid a time-consuming, high-risk position as soon as possible adds up nicely to her non-committal attitude towards her temporal assignment.

“And how did you end up here in the basement, Dana?”

Scully’s intake of air is almost dramatic. These questions are easier when she has Mulder by her side, when she can be only a part of a functional binomial, when her words are carefully chosen to tame Mulder’s opinion and she can afford the luxury to appear completely normal and rational if only by comparison. She knows now that her involvement in the X-Files wasn’t entirely a matter of chance and opportunity, that there has been people in the shadows pulling strings from the very beginning but she doesn’t know how to put that into words and still sound like herself.

It’s like she is not good at being Scully without Mulder there to push her gently into it.

“I was young and I was offered a position as a field agent where I could use my medical background,“ she oversimplifies.

“And you stayed,” she states instead of asking and Scully is grateful for that. Trying to get in the motives behind that without stepping into very personal grounds would be an impossible feat.

“I stayed,” she confirms with a warm smile and a longing look around that could imply that she is somehow charmed by the old furniture from scraps of other offices, the blurred pictures of alleged UFO’s and the little natural light that gets in through the windows.

Agent Stone looks at her with half lidded eyes, as if maybe trying to discerns if she is indeed full of it or just slightly delusional. 

Maybe a little bit of both. Most probably.

Before she knows it, the telephone is ringing and Skinner is asking them to his office to assign them a new case. Five african-american men have been found dead presenting severe depigmentation in Essex County, Massachusetts.

Scully tries to contain a shudder as she takes the folder in her hand.

\------  
_Since the development of Google Search in 1997, different ways of formulating the question of how to find one’s soulmate have been part of the yearly top ten searches._  
\------  
Mulder sighs, audibly and dramatically as he takes another turn around his apartment. He doesn’t spend most of his days sleeping anymore but reading or fixing his eyes steadily on the cathodic light of the TV or the computer monitor still gives him killer migraines if he overdoes it. He has found his limit to be about twenty minutes which leaves him with plenty of time to do nothing of interest at all. In his infinite boredom he has taken to clean, sort his mail and shop for groceries, leaving him with the firm conviction that he is not cut out to live a normal, suburban life and that he would literally crawl out of his skin if someone were to take his cell phone from him.

“She will be here within fifteen minutes,” he says to his fish, with whom he has recently developed a completely healthy, man-fish relationship in which he talks to them at length and they keep the eye rolling to a minimum.

He checks his watch again. Scully called when she was returning the car to the Bureau telling him that she wanted to check on him before calling it a day. He’s a little bit amused and slightly annoyed by her constant mothering, but he’s not about to point out that they have been in constant telephonic contact for the last couple of days and deprive himself of the pleasure of her company.

Mulder might have a malfunctioning brain but he’s not completely delusional anymore.

He opens the fridge and takes mental note of the refreshments he can offer her and then opens the cupboard to check if he remembered to buy those cheese crackers she likes to eat when she’s too tired for a meal but refuses to go to sleep with an empty stomach and then tries to sit still for about half a minute before giving up completely.

He is far too nervous for that. His palms are slightly sweaty as he bounces his basketball against the floor trying to get a grip of himself.

Still, somehow, when she knocks on the door and he opens it, he’s totally unprepared for her. She looks tired but calm. The remnants of her make-up are untraceable and her hair is a little frizzy, which is nothing he hasn’t seen before but he looks at her and he sees everything, every little detail of her, in slow motion.

It’s like his brain is trying to tell him to really pay attention because he could never make up the full complexity of her.

Scully raises one perfectly sculptured eyebrow at what must be his completely dumb face and starts to slowly smile.

“Mulder?”

“Yes,” he says stepping aside and inviting her in with a fluid motion of his hand. “Did you catch the Teliko?”

Scully doesn't skip a beat. She takes her jacket off and folds it carefully over the nearest chair as she consistently ignores his blatant reference to the paranormal.

“The suspect is currently receiving hormonal treatment at the county hospital and under custody of the local police,” she says, “if that is what you were asking.”

“And how is Agent Stone doing after working her first X-File?”

“She seemed okay. A little shaken,” she says, with a tired sigh. Her eyes look playful enough, though. “But she is not going to catch a terrible cold after getting soaked wet, so I’d say she’s doing better than most.”

“Oh Scully, but you looked so cute under the rain.”

“I looked green, which is exactly what I was.”

They both were, a lifetime ago. Mulder can barely believe that seven years ago he didn’t knew who she was. It is unthinkable for him to consider his life without her presence in it.

Scully smiles at him fondly and he just concentrates in the little details of her irises, the faint wrinkles under her eyes, the exact curve of her eyelashes. He dreamed a life without her and he still doesn’t understand how that is possible but it won’t happen again. He will memorize every little detail about her until his mental image of her will be perfect and unerasable. 

“Do you want something to eat? I have some leftover lasagna from the other day.”

“I’m not hungry, I just want to go to bed,” she says, with tired resignation, without a trace of anything remotely shady. 

He goes to fetch the crackers before sitting on his usual chair to let her run her little tests. Follow my finger with you eyes, stick your tongue out straight, remember this ten unrelated words for me…

Mulder knows this routine very well by now and he almost enjoys it, as if it was a private ritual instead of a medical procedure. Scully nibbles on a cracker as she checks his stitches.

“You could stay tonight,” he says out of nowhere, or maybe out of the half a million times that he has thought about vocalizing those words over the years. His voice sounds reasonable though, the thundering echo of his fast heartbeat seems to be inaudible for her.

She sighs. She’s so close as she finishes with her inspection of his skull that the warm air that leaves her mouth bathes the side of his face.

“I _need_ to take a shower,” she says, but it doesn’t sound like an excuse, not really. They both know she has a travel bag with a change of clothes with her at all times.

“You could shower here.”

“I guess I could.”

Mulder nods and stands up, trying to feign a calm demeanor that he’s never been cool enough to pull off.

“Okay, I’m going to find you some fresh towels.” And freak out with a little privacy as any respectable grown-up would do.

He goes to his room and walks in circles for five straight minutes in a vain attempt to blow some steam as he hears the front door close and open again some minutes later, when Scully comes back from retrieving her travel bag from her car. 

It’s not like they haven’t shared close quarters before. It’s not even like they haven’t shared a bed before, but the lack of pretense is giving him all kind of cardiac arrhythmias. He gets the green towels that he knows he washed earlier in the week from the bottom drawer of his closet and faces Scully in the living room feeling like the bravest man alive.

“Here,” he says presenting her the towels as if they were an offer to the gods, “I know you prefer a bathrobe but this towel is big enough so you can probably roll it around you twice.”

And then he stays there, planted on the very same spot, as Scully takes the towel and her toiletry and enters the bathroom closing the door after her. No one ever accused him of being smooth. 

Ever.

He manages to finally spring into action when the sound of the shower running starts to fill the apartment. He fills a couple of glasses with water and puts one of them on each nightstand. He neatly pulls back the comforter and looks for a blanket to leave at the foot of the bed in case that Scully gets cold in the middle of the night and switches the light off, only leaving a reading side lamp on. He changes into his night clothes and then he proceeds to lay down on the bed, with his legs crossed over his ankles and his hands crossed over his abdomen, breathing in and out as calmly as possibly.

When he hears the door of the bathroom open again he tenses a little bit and forces himself to close his eyes as he follows the sound of her barefoot steps on the floor.

Mulder doesn’t open them when he senses that she has entered the room or when her weight on the other side of the bed makes him uncross his ankles and cross them again. He has been tricked by one too many completely realistic dreams to risk her disappearing into thin air.

He can smell the almond shampoo she uses and if he concentrates hard enough, he can also feel the shadow of the warmth that emanates from her body, but he is not so brave as to open his eyes again until he can tell that Scully has switched off the remaining light. His pupils are already used to the darkness and when he turns his head. Over the pillow he can see the landscape of her silhouette.

“Good night, Mulder,” she says, sleepiness colouring her every word, but she leans in and the next thing he knows is that she is kissing him, softly and briefly on the lips before going back to lay on her side.

Mulder sighs. Loudly. His chest feels like bursting but his head chooses that precise moment to begin hurting with a dull constant pain.

He closes his eyes and concentrates on the rhythm of his own breathing.

“Good night, Scully.”

\------  
_The oldest representations of identifying soulmate marks on anthropomorphic figures are the parietal paintings within Altamira Cave, dated from 13 540 b. C (Arsuaga, J. L. et al., 1998)._  
\------

Scully sits carefully in one of Skinner’s visitor chairs. It has been a warm day and she had decided to take her stockings off after snagging them getting out of her car first thing in the morning. The faux leather of the seat always sticks on her naked skin uncomfortably so she crosses her legs and pulls down the hem of her skirt as much as possible as she prays for this already endless day to be promptly over.

The other chair creaks as agent Stone moves on it as if unable to hold still but their boss keeps reading their report without much of an acknowledgement of their presence. All in all, Scully would say the whole ordeal seems pretty routine to her but when she looks at her provisional partner, the blonde woman looks pale and way too nervous.

She wonders if she was ever that pale and nervous after filing a report. Maybe after her first encounter with Eugene Tooms, probably Donnie Pfaster.

“So,” Skinners crosses his hands over the table and looks at her like a thousand times before, with just a hint of incredulity in his eyes and an overwhelming amount of resignation. “The suspect is now under the estate police custody, I take?”

“Yes, Sir.”

“And I assume you have taken care of warning them of any special measures required in her handling?”

“Yes, Sir.”

Skinner nods slowly, and proceeds to check the report once again with studied disinterest.

“Agent Stone, I’ve noticed you have not signed the report. It’s not a request but it is customary, don’t you agree with what Agent Scully has written?”

Scully can see from the corner of her eye the uncomfortable movement on the seat next to her. She has seen the other woman’s cold shudders as they managed to get a hold of the suspect and the dark circles under her eyes ever since. Scully wonders if Agent Stone has been rethinking her life choices as she did once or twice in her early beginnings.

Maybe she should be wary or exasperated with this woman but Scully can only muster the resigned fondness reserved for the young ones that are about to make the same naive mistakes that everybody makes when they don’t know better yet.

“No Sir, it’s just that—” she interrupts herself and takes a deep intake of breath that sounds deafening to Scully. “That… _woman_ really came out of a gutter. She was hiding in there. A full-grown adult woman! Inside. A. Gutter!!”

Scully tries not to move a single muscle of her body, certainly not a single one of her face as Skinner takes out his glasses very slowly and sighs almost imperceptibly. It’s a gesture Scully has seen dozen of times usually directed at Mulder.

“I was under the impression that you understood the nature of the cases your were going to work on, Agent Stone,” Skinner says in the tone he usually employs to beg Mulder not to lose any more federal issued guns within the financial year.

“Yes Sir, but—”

“Then I suggest you follow Agent Scully’s lead if you want to still have a reputation in the Bureau after this assignment is over.”

“Yes, Sir.”

Scully almost flinches at the defeated tone of voice of the other agent but she just uncrosses her hands and makes sure that her hair is still behind her ears.

“That will be all, Agent Stone. Agent Scully I want to have a word with you if you have the time.”

“I do, sir.”

The blunt sound of square heels hitting the rug fills the room for the seconds it takes the other agent to vacant the room and close the door behind her. Scully feels the air in the office change and she allows herself to relax her stance a little bit.

“How is Mulder?” Skinner asks.

She takes a moment before answering, peeling off the layers of circumspection that she usually associates with their boss, sometimes she thinks he could be just a friend to them, but there is always the careful consideration of the appropriate timing so to not overstep. Skinner says “Mulder” and not “Agent Mulder” Scully notes, so she focuses on that to get a grip of the tone of the conversation.

“He’s improving but it’s a slow recovery.”

Skinner nods slowly and sighs as if he is deeply sorry for all her misfortunes. Sometimes she swears she’s the Cinderella of the spooky basement in this man’s eyes.

“Knowing how much Mulder enjoys his downtime I assume he is being a pain in the ass.”

Scully smiles a little. He can’t exactly argue with him when he is right, as much as he would like to defend her partner’s honor. And being completely honest with herself, she is just grateful for the small miracle of not being currently chasing Mulder around the state, trying to convince him not to aggravate his injuries. 

“No more than usual.”

“I guess that’s as much as anyone can ask for.” 

Scully nods once, slowly, and recognizes that the conversation has run to its end when Skinner starts to pack up the papers of the file in a way that make him look broader, more serious. Back to being just her boss again. She gets up, straightens her skirts and goes for the door.

“Scully? Tell Mulder that we wish him a prompt recovery. I don’t think agent Stone could take many more cases like the last one.”

She sighs a little louder than she intended to, as if the mere mention of Mulder and agent Stone in the same sentence could give her a headache of biblical proportions.

“Will do, Sir.”

She goes out of the office acknowledging Skinner’s secretary with a discreet smile and runs down the hall towards the elevator trying not to make direct eye contact with any agent. This is the same floor where their cubicles were allocated when they were under Kersh supervision and the thought of idle small talk and polite inquiries about Mulder’s leave of absence exhausts her. 

She used to be social, liked to play with the team, be part of the bigger scheme; now she has either become too cynical to endure the Bureau’s societal tendency to hypocrisy or too tired to make the effort to play nice.

Maybe Mulder’s lack of appreciation for civil socialization at work has finally started to rub on her. She checks her phone as she waits for the elevator and finds a cryptic text from him which consists on a close-up of a nonfat tofutti rice dreamsicle and an interrogation sign.

She rolls her eyes almost audibly and doesn’t even think about going back to the basement to check on her temporary partner. She will probably be rumiating her own frustration anyway and Scully knows from vast experience that cursing in the ladies room is better done in solitude. Instead, she marches across the hall, out of the building and towards the ice-cream cart that is usually located across the street.

She feels the sun warming her dark clothes as she approaches the cart. The naked skin of her legs will be soon red and irritated if she stays out of the shadow for long. Luckily he is easy to spot, with a grey, cotton t-shirt and a blue, FBI cap that makes him look like a tourist rather than an agent.

“Mulder, what are you doing here?”

He’s still a little pale under the bright sunlight but he is not as thin as he was a month ago and the dark circles under his eyes have almost disappeared, yet, it worries her that he might have overexerted himself coming all the way from his apartment.

“I wanted to invite you to an ice-cream,” he says as he presents presumably the same dreamsicle of the picture to her. “Or at least this poor substitute of an ice-cream that you insists that you like.”

She contemplates the gift for barely ten seconds. “You have licked it,” she says, taking the sweet anyway.

“It was melting.”

Scully tries not to smile but his eyes shine with a sly amusement that is highly contagious. She licks the cream that is quickly liquefying and nibbles a little of the wafer before Mulder leans into her.

“Let’s get out of here,” he says. His tone low and elusive, as if they were spies meeting for a secret mission in one of old Hollywood black and white movies.

She looks at him mildly scandalized. It’s not even noon yet but he has come all the way here and she doesn’t want to send him back home just yet. 

For purely medical reasons, of course.

“I can’t just leave, Mulder.”

He takes a small step, a tiny one, but he was already close to her and the distance between them is now almost non-existent. He moves his hand a couple of inches and his long fingers are suddenly grasping her free hand. “You have done it before. Just say I’ve done something stupid and you had to go to save my ass. Nobody would doubt it.” 

She shakes her head lightly because the idea is too tempting, to hold his hand and let him lead her away from the boring day she has ahead. His lips are starting to become too tempting too and they are literally in front of their workplace.

“I guess I could take an early lunch break,” she concedes. Her voice sounds weirdly breathless and small.

Mulder smiles, broadly, like this has been his plan all along, to just drags her along the streets of Washington DC with her hand in his and the sun shining upon them.

Her day doesn’t seem so dull anymore.  
\------  
_The international project ISIMMP symbol is a feather within a circle. According to all known historic registers, marks relating to feathers either by shape, word or concept, are the most common worldwide. (Mirzakhani (2000). Identifying soulmate marks in numbers)._  
\------  
The National Mall is not that full of tourists and casual runners so they manage to find an empty bench under the forgiving shadow of a tree without too much trouble.

Mulder watches carefully as Scully finishes her ice-cream and tries not to focus too obviously on his right hand, resting on the bench casually against Scully’s naked leg.

“So what you have been up to this morning?” she asks lightly.

Mulder hesitates for a moment. He’s spent a considerable part of his morning as he has taken to pass half of his days recently, which is obsessing over the memory of Scully’s marked thigh and Scully’s full lips over his and coming up with ridiculously elaborate plans to move their relationship to a less platonic level. But instead of saying anything remotely close to this, he simply takes his cap off.

He hears her gasp, her eyes a little wider as she looks at his extremely short, new haircut. His hair was uneven and brittle from the surgeries and the bandages, itchy and lank and he just couldn’t take it anymore.

“Langley helped me,” he explains as she reaches to pass her hand across his half an inch long hair.

Her fingers are careful as she inspects his new hairstyle, almost as a caress, softly running her hand against his scalp, and he is tempted to close his eyes and let his head rest over her lap. She might let him. Scully is different in parks, under the sun, less guarded. Effulgent.

“So, you let a person who hasn’t cut his own hair in the last decade cut your hair?”

“He has hidden talents, Scully.”

She laughs softly before finally finishing up her dreamsicle and Mulder tries to gain some courage from the fact that her early lunch break is running out of time.

If he ever knew how to express his feelings without hiding behind bad puns or life or death situations he has since forgotten. They haven’t even addressed the fact that they are soulmates, whatever that might mean for them, and the questions about how and when will Scully fall in love with him as the marks seem to predict, haunts him constantly.

He just wants to invite her out, have dinner at some nice restaurant or go see a funny movie. Something that they haven’t done before and that’s as far from work-related as possible, but blurting “Would you go out with me?” seems wildly inappropriate after they have spent the better part of the last six to seven years together in one way or another.

Some days he even worries that the people they have become to each other can only relate through work because this is not how it’s supposed to go. Everybody knows first you invite someone out, then you spent increasing amounts of time in each other’s company, then you fall in love, but he had to go and alter that neat order, making things way so much more complicated.

“I am supposed to start physical therapy on Friday. Finally,” he blurts out, because he is too much of a coward for his own good. “We should go out and celebrate.”

She doesn’t seem to think much of it. “Okay.”

Well, if the lack of any kind of special significance in her response it’s a bit of a let-down, Mulder can’t help but be at least be a little relieved that she has agreed to his proposition nevertheless.

“It’s getting late,” she says with a sigh, “I guess I’d better go back to work.”

She gets up and he follows her without thinking of it. The bright light makes her squint her eyes and Mulder feels suddenly brave, bold enough to try to peck her on the cheek before parting ways. For once he doesn’t overthink it, just takes a step to the right to situate himself in front of her, close enough but not too close. His stature provides her enough shadow to fully open her eyes and he puts his left hand on her side before leaning when seemingly out of nowhere Scully gasps loudly in a way that fills his mind with images of naked skin like a pavlovian response.

He freezes. His heart doubles, triples the speed of its beats.

For a couple of seconds he can’t move at all, not even to back down. His hand is still on her, over her ribs, and a flash image of his own marked ribs crosses his mind as his thumb moves in a slow circle over the very thin cloth of her shirt before even being able to form coherent thoughts about doing so.

Scully gasps again and looks accusatory at him, as if he was acting a little bit like a jerk for making her react this way

“Mulder, what are you—”

He doesn’t let her finish.

“Do you have a mark?” he asks with a hoarse voice, his fingers moving softly over her side again,” _here_?

He feels like he might stop breathing any minute now and his stomach jumps and turns itself upside down as Scully gasps a third time, more than a little annoyed.

“Of course I do, didn’t you see when—?”

“No.”

No, he didn’t. The angle was wrong and she turned around the wrong way for him to see. 

He’s going to kiss her, not a peck on the cheek but a proper kiss on the lips because she has two marks instead of one, like he thought, and he is not quite ready to think about all the implications of that at the moment, but he is quite ready to kiss her in a park and remember it all.

He puts his other hand on her nape. Her eyes look at him like the world around them doesn’t exist and he’s drawn to them, to her, as he once again starts to lean towards her.

Her cell phone rings, loud and obnoxious.

Of course that would be the moment her cell phone would to start to ring making both of them jump a little inside their skins. How could it be any other way. The sound is insistent and imposing, and Mulder would like very much to ignore it and maybe smash the damn device against the nearest trunk tree.

Instead, Scully takes some air and a step back as she fishes her phone out of her pocket. Mulder lets both of his arms fall to his sides, thinking about how to suggests politely a no-phones policy for their incoming dinner-maybe-date.  
\------  
_The probability of a person living in North America of sporting a new identifying soulmate mark once they reach the age of sixty four is described by a reverse logarithmic curve (Mirzakhani (2000). Identifying soulmate marks in numbers)._  
\------  
She takes a hand off the steering wheel and peeks at her watch for the twentieth time in as many minutes. It’s rush hour, she was expecting a slow trip back home but the traffic jam she is currently in the middle of is completely ridiculous in its biblical proportions. She was aiming for a little time for herself to relax and disconnect from the awful week at work, to take a slow, hot bath, and then apply that mango lotion that takes forever to absorb to her neglected skin, and maybe even put on some facial mask before getting ready to dine out. At this rate, she going to have to settle for a quick shower instead, which sucks.

She turns the car radio on and leaves it at a non descriptive station with nagging pop music that she never listens to, but it’s distracting enough. It suits her fine since she is simultaneously trying not to readjust her dinner plans every ninety seconds or every time a car in her vicinity slightly moves, and more important, not to overthink said dinner at all. 

It’s ridiculous that she is kind of nervous about the prospect of dining with Mulder. They’ve had dinners together for years now, all across the country. And lunches, and breakfasts for that matter. What they have never done before is going out on a date together, which seems to be the plan for the night. Although it’s been some time since she used to date on a regular or even on a non-regular basis, she’s pretty confident that she can still spot the signs, and two people in nice enough clothes in a nice enough place, with some food involved and nothing work related on the horizon spells D-A-T-E loud and clear.

The traffic keeps moving painfully slowly and by God, she needs that warm bath.

She wonders if she could convince Mulder to forego the whole restaurant thing in favor of some chinese take out in front of her TV. She could wear her cozy, ugly socks and her comfortable baggy clothes that she only wears at home and maybe fall asleep against his shoulder after hopefully, lazily making out.

It has been a long week. She has been doing autopsies for other departments from dawn to dusk for four consecutive days and Mulder has finally been cleared to start physical therapy so they’ve barely spoken to each other in that long.  
They have been busy. 

It’s not a big deal, and yet...

The truth is that for the last months she has gotten used to Mulder’s presence in her life outside the Bureau and if she lets herself think about it for more than five seconds she feels a little ridiculous for realizing that she misses him. She misses his voice narrating stupid Government conspiracy theories while she folds clothes, his warmth next to her as they both criticize the life choices of the latest contestant of that cooking reality show. 

It’s been a dull, tiring, long week and she just wants to spent some time with her best friend.

Who coincidentally happens to be her soulmate.

Whatever.

After half an hour of what could be described as the slowest traffic torture outside of L.A., she finally manages to reach the edges of her neighbourhood. She drives smoothly through the streets of Georgetown as if the seas had been parted for her benefit and she checks the hour one more time. 

It takes her another ten minutes to find a parking spot that is not so far from her apartment that she might have to take the bus to get there, but still leave her time for either a quick shower and the mango lotion or a hot bath and some basic routine.  
In the end she chooses the bath.

She is about to blow her hair dry when Mulder knocks and she’s already dressed in a not so conservative green blouse and slacks, shoeless feet slide over the linoleum as she goes to open the front door. 

“You are surprisingly on time, Mulder,” she says, and then she says nothing else, doesn’t invite him to step inside, not even with a small gesture of her hand as she takes him in. She hasn’t applied any makeup yet and she is wearing a towel around her head like a turban while he looks like he came straight from a expensive cologne ad photoshoot.

“Don’t get used to it, Scully. I like the trend of being fashionably late.”

He smiles, a small, almost shy smile that Scully knows means trouble because Mulder might be described in many colorful ways, but being shy is certainly not one of them. That smile provoques dangerous, involuntary responses inside her. 

She smiles back, it’s impossible not to. He looks freshly shaved, his short, kind of prickly hair suits him better than it has any right to, and the white shirt over his tight dark jeans is like adding gasoline to a fire of sexual frustration. 

Scully manages to remember that they are still at the door so she takes a step to the side to invite him in and closes the door after him.

“I’m almost ready. There is soda and root-beer in the fridge. Help yourself.”

“Don’t worry Scully, I know where you keep the good stuff.”

She goes back to the bathroom and blows her hair as quickly and proficiently as she can. She looks critically at herself in the mirror as she applies some makeup that would barely classify as more than just basic and finally decides to go for the complete makeover and change into something more daring. She hunts in the back of her closet until she finds that black dress with the spaghetti straps and the insinuating neckline and changes clothes so quickly it could make a runway model proud.

When she comes out of her room Mulder is sitting on the couch playing with the TV remote, changing channels fast enough that it should be impossible for any common human being to tell what it’s being broadcasted.

“You changed clothes,” he says when he looks at her, his little game against the TV seemingly forgotten.

“You are observant, should be an FBI agent.”

He leaves the remote on the coffee table and gets up. On the screen, a documentary insists at length on the doom of the human race by its own hand.

It seems fitting, somehow.

She intertwines her fingers in front of her, a little nervous under his stare as he takes a couple of steps.

“So, should we get going?” she is vaguely aware that a reservation has been made although she can’t remember exactly where or when.

“Sure, I just—”

He doesn’t finishes his sentence. His right hand goes to the side of her face until the pads of his long fingers can caress the soft hairs of her nape and he leans to kiss her.

It’s simple. It should not be this simple when for so long it appeared too complicated, but Mulder kisses her without hesitation and she can feel the turning point making her toes curl inside her shoes. It’s like she has been walking towards a cliff for years, fearing the end of the road in every step just to arrive to edge and find out she has wings. 

His lips on hers are soft but when she opens her mouth his tongue slips in, unrelenting and unimposing. Scully unclasp her hands and roams her fingers across his hair. She can still feel the healed scars on her fingertips, his nose softly bumping against her cheekbone and the pressure of his chest against hers. She feels his hand running down her bare shoulder, her shoulder blade.

Her soulmate marks are alight, burning in a consuming, engulfing way. She’s a little more desperate than she would like to admit as she kisses him back.

Her home phone starts ringing. The sound is annoying and coming from far away so she is more than ready to ignore it but Mulder inhales deeply and retreats a couple of inches.

“Aren’t you going to get that?” he says smugly as if his breathing wasn’t as erratic as hers.

“Later.”

“Not going to argue with you there, Scully.”

She gets sidetracked, her lips find a new purpose on the line of his jaw, the side of his neck, as the ringing noise of the phone ends and the air is suddenly filled with the echo of Mulder’s labored breathing.

Mulder’s fingers under her chin redirect her mouth to his again. Her lips are sensitive to his touch, almost like electricity running from one to the other as they kiss again, building up so slowly that it defies the pass of time.

The sound of her cellphone irrupts and this time there is a feeling of urgency in the ring that she can’t explain but that Mulder must hear too because they both break the kiss at the same time. 

It’s late in the evening of a friday and a call to her home quickly followed by a call to her cellphone when Mulder is right next to her it’s a rare situation, so rare that it makes her run across the living room to reach her purse.

She looks a the caller ID and her breath catches on her throat before answering.

“Charlie?”

There is a long, heavy sigh at the other end of the line.

“Hey, Dana. I know it’s been a while and it’s kind of late there but I really need to talk to you.” The worry in his voice is unmasked.

She closes her eyes, for just a moment, and prepares herself. She is aware of Mulder as he cautiously approaches her, glad that he’s here, near her for whatever is about to come, and she wonder if that makes her selfish.


End file.
